“How do you know I want to raze the house and stables?”
I shrugged. “It’s just a guess.”
He nodded quickly. “My father’s arrest will still be all over the news, and social media will go nuts.”
“Yes,” I said solemnly. “And people are gonna ask you about it, so you need to decide what you wanna say on the subject.”
“My sisters always defended him,” he whispered. “They never believed me.”
“You told them?”
He nodded.
“You never told Mr. Cox.”
“No. He has no idea.”
“You should probably call him here shortly, wake him up and get the PR machine runnin’,” I apprised him. “You need to get ahead of this so it’s your narrative and no one else’s.”
I watched his eyes narrow as he looked at me.
“Say it, whatever it is.”
“You violated faith too.”
“Yes.”
“You did the wrong thing.”
“I did,” I agreed. “And I will pay for it.”
“Even though you did it for all the right reasons, it’s still wrong.”
“No question.”
“You could have come to me with the phone and asked me to play the message.”
“Absolutely.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“My gut said to act. To beg for forgiveness later but to annihilate the threat now.”
“And you did.”
“Yes.”
“Would you forgive me if I’d invaded your privacy like that?”
I had to think. “I don’t know.”
“And yet, you want me to forgive you.”
“More than you can imagine.”
“It was horrible, and if it were anyone else but you, that would be it,” he said, standing to move to the end of the couch and sitting down close to me. “But you…you’ve made a home for me, and it’s become my normal, and I need to thank you for that.”
“You did it yourself,” I informed him gruffly, my voice faltering.
“But you put a foundation in place over the past almost three months, and I’ve gotten used to it. I had no idea how much I was missing something solid.”
I nodded. “It was Mr. Cox’s call.”
“Yes,” he agreed. “But you were the one with the patience to be there.”
I didn’t know what to say, so I just held his gaze.
“It’s terrible, what you did,” he whispered. “And great at the same time.”
I waited for him to make a decision about me, and I felt utterly powerless as he passed judgment.
He leaned forward and put his hands on my thighs just above my knees. “Here’s the thing, the last time I had solid ground under my feet was before my mom died.”
“When was that?” my mother asked.
He turned to look at her and then got up and went to the glass doors that led out to the porch before turning and leaning back against them.
“My mother passed away when I was seven,” he told her. “And the next day, my father sold her mare, even though I begged him to let me keep her.”
Jesus.
“I ran after the horse trailer they took her away in. I went a long way, and I got lost. Our mailman, he saw me and took me back.”
Please God, let that be the end of the story.
“That was the first night my dad hit me,” he confessed, turning and staring out at the patio. “I remember thinking that I wished I could be in the ground with my mom.”
The strangled sound my mother made was not a surprise. When she got up and staggered toward him, he had the good sense to pivot and face her, opening his arms. She was a good hugger, my mother, and I didn’t know anyone who needed her more than him. Even me. I was more than ready to step aside and let her love on him.
Rubbing my eyes hard with the heels of my hands, I stood up and went to the dining room table, leaning over to rest my forearms on the back of one of the chairs. “It would be helpful for you to talk to someone, don’t you think?”
“Like a shrink, you mean,” he stated, not asking a question.
“Yeah,” I said, glancing at my mother. “And I bet she has an idea for someone who can help.”
She took a step back to look up at his face, her smile serene. “As I said before, you’ve been so very strong, but I think Locryn’s right and you need a lifeline.”
“I’m not going to break or––”
“Of course not,” she insisted. “But you have been through a trauma that you’ve never discussed with anyone until right now, with us.”
After a moment he gave a slight tip of his head in agreement.
“So it might behoove you to work through those feelings instead of having to drink or do drugs to numb yourself.”
“You don’t understand,” he told her. “I don’t spend my days thinking about how a day didn’t go by without my father knocking me across the room just for breathing wrong.”
The anger that swelled inside of me was hard to choke down. I had the urge to fly to Lexington and see if my boss’s friend would give me some time alone in a cell with Sterling Madison. Not that it would do anything but make me feel better. If the man was not learning about karma right then, he certainly would soon. His whole life was about to change, and it would never be the same.