“Who?”
“Delilah,” she said.
Her name permanently residing around us.
Maggie continued. “He told me that she didn’t know much, only that you gave up a baby for adoption when you were seventeen. But that was clearly enough for him to run with it.”
My mind wandered back to the night at the bar when I put Delilah in her place, before that, she’d made some one-off comment about me keeping secrets but at the time I thought she was talking about Stetson.
Obviously, I was wrong.
No wonder she’s taking a month-long vacation. She’d lit a match and planned to be somewhere else to watch it burn.
“I’m not even surprised. She’s the fucking worst and eventually I’ll deal with her, but I’m ultimately the one to blame and now everything is a mess, Maggie. I just want to crawl into bed and never get out,” I said in between sniffles. “Last night, everything felt too good to be true, and I should’ve known it was. I told you I didn’t deserve this kind of happiness and I was right. Now I have a massive shit storm to deal with, and this time it doesn’t just affect me. It affects Stetson too.” The sudden pang of remorse almost took me out as soon as his name left my mouth.
Maggie wrapped her arms around me. “It’s okay, Scar. We’ll figure this out. We always do.”
Chapter Thirty-One
“Hey, darlin’.”
My body startled, the bridle in my hand falling to the ground.
“Sorry, didn’t mean to scare you,” George said.
“No worries. I’m just a bit on edge, that’s all.”
The last week had been shitty to say the least. Plus, it didn’t help that every damn place I looked, there were bullshit headlines on new articles spouting more exaggerations and lies about my life.
I felt so uncomfortable.
Uncomfortable for the way I just ran out and left Stetson. Uncomfortable thinking about how he was having to deal with all the backlash from this coming out. Uncomfortable because I didn’t have him next to me. But mostly uncomfortable with myself and how I’d allowed myself to get here.
“That’s why I wanted to come check on you. See how you were doin’ with everything. I imagine having the whole world know all your secrets ain’t too much fun,” he admitted, leaning against the door frame of the tack room.
“You could say that,” I mumbled, dropping to snag the bridle from the floor. “But honestly, I don’t think that’s the part that upsets me most. It’s that I wasn’t the one who got to tell Stetson about my past.”
“You mean about the adoption?”
“Yeah.” I nodded. “And what makes everything worse is that this all happened the same night I met Ruby, his late best friend’s daughter who was adopted. The same one whose birth parents he’d been on a mission to find, a promise he’d made to his friend before he passed,” I shared.
The words felt sticky as they came out, making the guilt heavier.
“I know,” George replied.
I rotated around. “You knew?”
“Stetson and I have spent a lot of time together, just us and this big ol’ farm. And these hills tend to give people the luxury of keepin’ their secrets,” he said.
Selfishly, a piece of me wished he would’ve told me, but I knew George well enough to know he’d never share something that wasn’t his to share, something I deeply admired about him. I was fairly confident the man knew things that could light this whole town on fire, and yet you’d never hear him mumble a word of it.
“Fair enough. I just wish I would’ve said something earlier, but I guess hindsight is always twenty-twenty, isn’t it?” I admitted, but I had no one to blame but myself. “It’s just that every time it gets brought up, an immense sense of guilt and embarrassment flood through me, like I’m tarnished or somehow less than. So, when you’re trying to impress someone, something like that feels hard to disclose.”
He nodded as a soft smile grazed his lips. “Uh-huh. That’s what I thought,” he said. “For years you’ve carried around this guilt and embarrassment like a ball and chain. I don’t know whyyou’re doing that to yourself, and it pains me to think that you see yourself as a bad person because of it.”
“Well, I should’ve been brave enough to keep the child.Mychild. I should’ve figured it out instead of taking the easy way out and running from the situation. Sometimes I can’t believe I was able to give away my own flesh and blood so quickly and just move on with my life. Quite honestly, it makes me sick to even think about it.”
“But that’s the thing, darlin’, you didn’t move on with your life. Why do you think it is that you never wanted to leave Quincey Falls? You think maybe it has anything to do with the fact that you always hoped they’d come back here and find you?” The silence floated around us like dust particles before George went on. “Because I do.”
