Page 109 of An Endless Memory

“It’s not.”

I slid a glare toward him, and he glanced at me, challenging me to argue.

I had no rebuttal. The divorce wasn’t complicated. Lily and her family had figured out a workaround, and she’d decided to take the extra time to find something real. I should let her go. But I couldn’t. Not yet.

What we’d had was real. I missed the phone calls. I missed the messages. I missed looking forward to seeing her again. I missed walking into a house that felt like a home.

So why had I been avoiding her?

“You ever think about Mama?” I didn’t know what made me speak, but there was a pressure valve inside of me that needed a little release before I ended up like the Bobcat’s hydraulics.

He grunted. “Maybe not as much as I should, but then she never gave me much thought either.”

“But you remember what she used to say?”

“A lot of bullshit came out of her and Barns’s mouths.”

“Yeah.”

Houses on the edge of town were coming into view. Our talk would be paused once we reached the hardware shop. I needed to get this out. There were some things my brothers and I had never talked about.

“She didn’t like having boys, that’s for sure,” Wilder said.

“She said it’s inevitable that Knight men let down women in their lives.”

He blew out a breath. “Damn, I forgot about those tirades. She wasn’t right though. I mean, yeah, for many years, I wasn’t what Sutton needed, but I got there. I let her go because I didn’t want to be like Barns and coerce her into staying when she was unhappy.” He slowed as we got farther into town. “Maybe that’s why Austen stayed single so long. And you. But Cody didn’t let down Meg, and he sure as fuck isn’t failing Tova.”

“Yeah.” Was I the anomaly? The one to prove Mama right?

He took a few turns and then parked in front of the hardware store. Exhaust billowed around us from vehicles left running in the frigid cold.

“Is Mama why you think Lily’s better off without you?” he asked.

I scrunched my face up. “No.” That was a lie. “Maybe. Being married had me thinking of Mama a lot.”

Wilder barked out a dry laugh. “Our parents are not ones to take advice from. They weren’t role models, and they were two of the most selfish people I’ve ever met in my life.” He shook his head. “We’ve all had to get over shit from them. All of us. Even Aggie, and we know how Mama thought girls were better.”

I didn’t realize I was nodding at first. I’d been in on some of those talks with my siblings as they found the loves of their lives. I’d found mine, and I’d been too afraid of fucking it up.

“What if I don’t know how to love?” Did that question sound as stupid as it felt?

He snorted. “You could’ve fooled me. You came down when you heard she was sick.”

“She had no one to help her.”

“You drove in a storm so you could be with her on Halloween.”

I had to look out the passenger window. “Because it was supposed to be our first time together.”

“No shit?” Surprise rang in his question.

I nodded.

“You’ve gone longer than that without getting laid. You sure it had nothing to do with missing out on trick-or-treating with kids you adore? That you hated not being there for Lily? Maybe you hoped she’d wear a sexy vet tech costume.”

“She doesn’t need a costume. She’s already a sexy vet tech.”

“Eliot, you’ve got it bad.”

---