I snorted. “It’s definitely a beer.”
“Good. So is this where I tell you I’m bi, too?”
My eyes widened, and I must’ve made a sound, because Aunt Win giggled.
“Christ, you’re even more of a hippie than I thought!” I teased, because there was a sudden warmth spreading in my chest and the realization that she knew what I was going through for real, at least on some level, was a bit much right then.
“Oh, nephew mine, you have no idea.” She sounded delighted. Then she got more serious. “So, what’s his name?”
Snorting softly, I took a long pull from my bottle. I smothered down a belch, then grunted out, “His last name is Harrington.”
She whistled. “Well, that’s not ideal.”
“No, no it’s not.”
“Is it Crew?” she asked gently.
I almost dropped my bottle. “W-What?”
She chuckled. “Pay talks about him all the time when he calls us.”
Right. I’d forgotten that Pay and Mom chatted more often now. Jenn had told me that on the days when Pay got tired after lunch, he often wanted to call his Nana “for a chat” and then he fell asleep on the phone with her.
For Aunt Win to know about all that wasn’t surprising in the least.
“Why hasn’t Mom mentioned anything?”
“Because she wants to give you space.” Then she snorted. “And because she can’t quite wrap her mind around bisexuality. We're working on that, though.”
I snorted too. “Yeah, I think I knew that.”
“Thus you called me instead.”
“Yeah.”
“Okay. Tell me everything, let’s see if I can help you sort out your thoughts.”
I dove in and told her everything. Twenty minutes later, I sighed.
She hummed thoughtfully. “I think your biggest issue is that you lost your belief in people after what happened with Daniel.”
The fact that she didn’t say “your dad” was telling. She carried the weight with us, after all.
“Yeah.”
“But you have to see that Crew is doing everything he can to give you all the choice. He’s not hiding anything—”
“Anymore.”
Aunt Win snort-chuckled. “Honey, he went to get your horse because he knows how much a heart horse means to a person. He didn’tknowyou yet, but he still knew to get her because he could.”
I was getting to the point where I could grudgingly agree with her assessment.
Then she dropped the final thing. “If you had the farm still and you hired someone who had lost their horse like you did Jaina, wouldn’t you go get that horse for them, too?”
I blew out a breath. “Yeah.”
“Would that mean you were doing some gesture of charity, or that you were a good person?”
