Page 64 of Hero for the Holidays

“You could grow more things year-round. Citrus even. Avocados.”

“Icould,” said Fia. “But I’ve always felt like we needed to stick to local and seasonal.”

“It would still be local and seasonal if it was in your greenhouse.”

“Fair,” she said. “But I don’t go to your ranch and tell you that you should have bison. You have cows.”

“I do,” he said. “But maybe I would get a bison.”

“Then maybe I’ll get an avocado.”

They looked at each other for a moment, and he tried to ignore the swift kick in his chest he felt when her green eyes sparkled with humor.

“Come on. Let’s go. Gus is expecting us,” he said.

“Yep,” she said, closing the door behind her and heading down the steps with him. They got into his truck. And there was something about that that felt quintessentially old-school Fia and Landry.

Being in his truck with her. He felt compelled to make her laugh. He’d done that. Back then there had been a lot of laughing.

They hadn’t exactly talked very deeply about the things that were going on in their lives. They had been an escape for each other. In that sense, he had known that things weren’t great at her house, because he knew that he didn’t share what was going on at his own.

So he had accepted that what they were was a break. From the lives they didn’t want to be living. They chose each other. They chose those nights out in the cabin. Furtive escapes during the day in his truck.

It had felt like the real world. The real thing.

His house was just a place he had to go sleep.

Fia had been his home.

He turned his thoughts away from that particularly raw realization.

“Memories,” she said, sighing.

He was taken off guard by her absolutely unerring ability to speak his own thoughts out loud.

“How did you do that?”

“What?”

“Know exactly what I was thinking.”

She leaned forward in the seat. “I was thinking the same thing about you earlier today. You always say what I’m thinking.”

The truck went over a pothole in the road, and they pitched forward and back. “Maybe our thoughts are just both headed down the same road most of the time. Because what we’re living in is definitely a resurrection of a shared past.”

“Definitely,” she said softly.

“We just pretended it didn’t happen,” he said. “How did we do that? Now we talk about it every day. I think about it every day. From morning to night. Every day. I go over it. Us. Lila. The way that we hurt each other.”

“Me too,” she said. “I don’t know. Survival, I guess? The same way that my parents just left here and barely acted like they had kids at all?”

“Maybe that’s how you protect yourself when you know something is too messed up to untangle. Even if your parents came back, would you guys forgive them?”

“It depends. First of all, my mom and my dad aren’t the same thing. Second of all, I think me and my sisters all had different experiences with our parents. The younger girls really worshipped my dad. Especially Alaina and Quinn. Rory less so. But she was never so much the rancher. She was kind of the nerd. The bookish one. She spent a lot of time with Gideon and his family, because she didn’t even go to school here like the rest of us. She sort of had a life outside of this place, and I think part of me was envious of that. Sometimes I didn’t. And I also never could see my dad as an infallible figure. I was way too aware of the issues he and my mom had. Because she told me. I was the oldest. I was the sounding board. I never wanted to do that to Lila.” She looked over at him. “We were so dramatic sometimes. I never saw them in us back then. I couldn’t imagine that the connection my parents had shared at one time was probablysexual. Gross. Who wants to think that? I thought that you and I were unique. But... When I imagine what our relationship would have looked like once a child was in the middle of it...”

“You think that’s what we’d be like.”

“Exactly. So, if my parents came back, would I forgive them? No. Because I think that you should be able to trust her parents, and I’ve never been able to trust mine the way that a child should be able to trust their parents. I had to take care of them. I had to bear their burdens. I can give them space to be part of Lila’s life if they decide they want to make an effort, and if they’re good to her.” She sighed. “I don’t need topunishthem. But at the same time I will never be able to have the relationship with them that a child should be able to have with their parents.”

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