“What does that mean? Safe?”
She shrugged. “I don’t even know anymore. It goes back to when we were teenagers.” She wasn’t about to tell him about her and Dare’s miscommunication after they’d made out when they were teenagers. “Accepting his proposal was a mistake, and I wish I could take it back.”
“I understand how you feel, but you have to see it for what it was. That proposal was Eddie’s desperate attempt to hold on to the girl he loved. Plain and simple. It’s a wonderful thing to have been loved that much, and you should not feel guilty for not loving him back in the same way. We can’t choose who we fall in love with. That’s the beauty of love. It sneaks up when we’re not looking, and when it’s real, it never lets go. But for most people, that deep, desperate love is unrequited.”
“Like Eddie’s.”
“His wasn’t unrequited. You loved him. That’s something, and he knew that, sweetheart.”
“I wish you had told me he was going to propose. Maybe we could have talked like this, and you could have told me to turn him down. Then I wouldn’t have been shocked and done the wrong thing.”
“That sounds like it would have been an easy solution, doesn’t it? But there’s no right or wrong when it comes to love. You did what your heart told you to do at that moment. And that’s okay. You need to stop trying to take the blame for what happened. Eddie was like a son to me. We all lost a great friend, but it’s nobody’s fault. Not even his. He didn’t know what would happen. It sounds like he was so worked up, he believed he could pull it off.”
“That’s what Dare said, that he wanted to prove he was still a man and I hadn’t broken him.”
“Dare’s a smart guy, and I think he’s right. But just so we’re clear, I’m your father, sweetheart, but you were an adult, and you’re no wallflower. If you didn’t want to marry him, I knew you’d tell him so. But if I had cautioned you against it, you might’ve just married him to show me you were badass Billie and could do what you wanted.”
She rolled her eyes.
“You can roll your eyes all you want, but you know how you are.” He smiled. “Parenting is not easy, and I never know if I’m doing the right thing. I just do what feels right at the time, and it’s never been up to me to change the course of my daughters’ lives. I never tried to change your love of doing outrageous things, or told you to find a better career than running the bar, or forbade you from wearing leather pants or baring your belly, because those are your choices, and all those things have helped to make you who you are. But I have tried to let you girls know that I’m here for you, and you can always talk to me.”
“You’re a great dad, and I’ve always known I could come to you. I just wish I had back then.”
“We can’t go backward, sweet pea, but I will say this. I raised you to make the right decisions for you and to deal with the repercussions that came from them. But I never anticipated this situation. In hindsight, I wish I’d had a crystal ball. I would have stopped you before you said yes, but not because I think it would’ve changed what happened to Eddie. You know I believe the universe gives and it takes away, and we have no control over the whens and hows of it all. But I’d have stopped you so that you wouldn’t have blamed yourself, because Eddie chose to try that stunt. He chose to propose knowing you would probably say no. You need to let that guilt go, and maybe the best way to go about that is by doing exactly what you’re doing.”
“Going crazy?”
“You’re not going crazy, honey. You’re slowly letting people back into your life, and that stirs up new emotions on top of guilt and a hundred other emotions you’ve been bottling up for years. If there’s one thing I learned in therapy, it’s that things get worse before they get better, and even when you think everything’s cool, it’ll bite you in the ass again. But hopefully by then you’ll have let enough of us in to help you when it hurts so much all you want to do is close those doors again.”
She hoped she could do that, because it was hard and lonely staying behind those closed doors, and even though she was slowly opening those doors, she knew life outside them was so much better. “I didn’t know you went to therapy.”
“Your mother and I both did because we didn’t just lose Eddie, we lost a big part of you, too, and that’s not something either of us was equipped to handle. But Colleen, over at the ranch, was there for us, and we got through it.”
Her heart ached. “I’m sorry, Dad. I had no idea my moods affect you and Mom so much.”
“You girls are our hearts and souls. If you’re sad or mad, we are, too. But there’s no need to apologize to me. I’m your father, and that comes with the territory. I’m also not the one who suffered the most. That would be the young woman you see in the mirror every morning.”
Her throat thickened.
“And as far as Dare goes, he didn’t take away badass Billie by getting you to go to the park with him. He gave that strong-willed girl a kick in her butt, and it made you even more badass. It takes a lot of guts to face the things that scare you.” He leaned closer, lowering his voice. “We both know I’m not talking about the rides.”
Her phone vibrated, and she took it out of her armband. There was a text from Dare. Her pulse quickened as she read it. Hey, Wildfire. Space sucks. I like mine better when you’re in it. Hope it’s helping you. How could a single text make her feel so good? She wanted to respond with, I miss you, too, but even after everything her father had said and the relief it brought, being able to put her feelings into writing still felt out of reach.
“Everything okay?” her father asked.
She nodded. “You’ve given me a lot to think about, Dad, so I hope it will be. But I feel like sorting out all these feelings is going to be more challenging than any race or stunt I’ve ever taken on.”
“That’s because you’re the fiercest competitor I know, and you’re up against yourself. But we both know that once you put your mind to something, there’s no stopping you.”
He couldn’t know how badly she hoped that was true.
“THIS IS A whole lot better than shoveling shit.” Kenny ripped the last old screw from the wooden fence post they were fixing and tossed it into the bucket, squinting his slightly-less-brooding eyes from the afternoon sun. He didn’t like wearing the hat Dare’s mother had given him. He said it made his head hot.
They’d been fixing fences for the past forty minutes, and Kenny had proven to be a strong worker.
“There are always chores to be done on the ranch. Some suck, and others suck a little worse. But if we slack off, the horses can get hurt.” Dare moved the bucket where he’d discarded screws from the opposite post, watching Kenny get the new fence rail from the truck.
“Then why do you work out here when you could sit in an office?”
Dare handed him the power drill and went to hold the other end of the rail. “I don’t like to be confined.” What he didn’t say was that it was also easier to get kids like him to open up if they were distracted by other things. There was nothing worse than feeling like the opening act of a show, and to Dare, who had shown up in his mother’s office dozens of times after Eddie had died looking to bend her ear, that’s what normal one-on-one therapy in an office felt like. His mother had suggested they take a walk, and it had made talking about his feelings and fears a thousand times easier. Do you have time for a walk? had become code for I’m having a hell of a day and can really use some help. Once he started working with clients, he found that talking with his clients outside gave him a clearer picture of who they were, and that was a beautiful thing. But today the distraction was helping Dare, too. He’d texted Billie several hours ago and still hadn’t heard from her. It was taking everything he had not to drive his ass over there and find out what the hell was going on in her head.