“Is she going to be pissed that you brought a man up?”
“You’re hardly a man.” I shrugged, then laughed a little at his wounded expression. “I mean, you’re…you. You’re our friend, not just any man. Besides, Charity gave me the nod to bring you up.” I rushed through that last part, hoping to cease my babbling.
“This is why she bought the bar, huh? So they could live above it?” he asked, his eyes sweeping over the hand-drawn pictures taped on the twenty-year-old refrigerator.
“Exactly. She used her inheritance from our grandfather’s will. When Rose was born, Charity and Dad weren’t exactly speaking. Mom and I supported her when she’d let us, but she wanted to do it on her own. We’d babysit, but she installed the alarm, wired cameras to her cell phone and everything, so she could manage downstairs while Rose slept and still spend her days with her.”
“I understand that,” he said, looking at the camera in the corner of the kitchen. “Needing to make it on your own.”
“You’re just as stubborn as she is.” I shook my head.
“Well, you know us black sheep. When you reject the path everyone else takes, you have to carve your own.”
“Is that what you call it?” I braced my hands on the counter and jumped to sit on the edge.
“What did you use your portion of the inheritance for?” he asked, ignoring my question.
“Why did you reject that path?” I challenged, folding my arms across my chest.
He watched me for a moment, and I held my breath, tension winding in my limbs as he decided whether or not to answer. Decided which sides of himself he was willing to share with me.
God knew he kept me guessing, shifting our roles so frequently that I never knew our norm. I was never sure if that was to keep me off-balance or because he genuinely never knew, either.
“Charity did it for love. First for Gabe, then Rose. But why did you reject that path?” I asked again.
“The path rejected me,” he said quietly. “It didn’t want me, so I decided not to want it.”
I swallowed the lump in my throat, my mind racing with every possible situation that he could apply that philosophy to and wondering how many times his disdain had masked longing.
“Now you. The inheritance?”
“I went to art school. It took me about six months after Sully died to realize that I didn’t, and it didn’t matter how long I waited here in Alba, he wasn’t coming home.” I broke eye contact. Would Cam see it as the betrayal my father had? “So the plans we’d made to go away to college together once his three years were up didn’t matter anymore. I had to take a really hard look at what I’d thought my future would be without him and ask myself an impossible question.”
“How much of that plan reflected your choices and how much belonged to Sullivan?” Cam’s question brought my gaze right back to his.
My heart pounded, my tongue heavy and unwilling to say the words I’d never been able to before.
“Yes,” I finally admitted, the word taking six long years of guilt with it as it left my lips. “And I realized how much of myself I’d given up in the interest of an easy relationship. And it was easy—with Sullivan, that is. I don’t want you to think it wasn’t. Or that he wasn’t good to me.”
“I don’t think that.”
“Okay. Good.” Fingers trembling faintly, I tucked my hair behind my ears. “Because we were happy, and I think I could have been happy following our plan. Going to Boulder. Then maybe law school. Then back here. I could have been happy…,” I trailed off in an unconvincing whisper.
“You just wouldn’t have been you.” The way he watched me sanded away layers of my carefully polished veneer.
“Or maybe that was really me, and this is the alternate reality where everything is messed up.”
He stood, filling the room with more than his massive frame. Cam was a presence that walls couldn’t contain. I wasn’t sure anything could.
“The girl who painted the murals on the hot springs ruins wouldn’t have been happy. Maybe content, but not happy. There’s a difference, Willow. And I’d like to think that Sullivan would have seen that eventually, and you would have gone to art school anyway.”
I shook my head. “Sully never wanted to ruffle feathers. I mean, if Alexander was the good kid, and you were the rebel, then he was the one who wanted to simply exist without conflict. So he would have gone with Dad’s plan. He was the easy one, and it was so easy to love him.” I’d simply realized in these last years that it wasn’t the right love—the consuming, passionate, all-encompassing one in the books and songs I loved. But that truth would never leave my lips. I’d let it fester and rot inside me before admitting something like that.
“It was easy to love him, for all of those reasons and more,” Cam agreed. “But that doesn’t explain why you had to use your inheritance to go to college.”
“My father thought I was still in shock from Sully’s death. That I was being irrational and lashing out against what he felt was a logical and acceptable plan. In reality, I was trying to honor my first dream, since I’d lost my last. I was trying to figure out who I was without Sullivan.” And without you. Not that I hadn’t lost Cam years before when he’d shipped off to basic. “Dad refused to pay for it, which was fine. It’s his money, after all. But once I saw his decision for what it was—his need to control me because he’d lost that control over Charity—I paid for it myself.”
“You carved your own path.” He moved closer but didn’t crowd me.
“For four years, I did. I learned, and I lived, and I even dated, not that anyone in Alba would believe me.” I inhaled deeply, bolstering my courage. “Does that make you hate me?”
“What?”
“That I moved on.”
His eyebrows furrowed. “No. Of course not. Why the hell would you even remotely think that?” He moved to lean against the counter next to me, effectively breaking eye contact.
“Xander was disappointed when I told him one Christmas. The look in his eyes… It was like I’d cheated on Sully. And honestly, that first date felt a lot like I had.”
“Willow, you can’t cheat on someone who’s dead.” His gaze fell to the floor.
“I know that now. It took a few years for me to really get that, but eventually I did. But every time I came home on break, it felt like I was moving on and the town wasn’t. And I get it. I do. Change is literally Alba’s worst enemy. The people in this town would still have me wearing widow black if they had their way, weeping at a shrine for Sullivan.”