Page 163 of The Widow and the Wanted

“Nice of your pa to visit,” Boone says, with a stupid grin.

Okee is standing near the table, one hand braced against the back of a chair. His face has gone strangely blank, as if all the feeling has been scraped out of it. Then his mouth trembles once.

Only once.

Boone’s grin dies at once. “Okee?”

“I’m sorry,” Okee says.

The words come so quietly, I nearly miss them.

Boone blinks. “What?”

Okee draws a breath, but it catches before it can become useful. His hand tightens on the chair until the wood gives a faint complaint beneath his grip.

“I’m so sorry,” he says again, and this time his voice breaks clean through.

The sound of it unsettles me more than his father’s cruelty did. Okee Collins is not a man who comes apart. He is iron where Boone is flame. He plans, endures, observes. Even grief seems to pass through him in private channels, never spilling where anyone might see.

But now his eyes shine wet.

Boone goes still.

“That man,” Okee says, swallowing hard, “had no right to speak to you that way. Those things he said—Boone, they are not true.”

“I know,” Boone says gently. “It ain’t your fault.”

But Okee looks as though knowing is not nearly enough.

He crosses the room and takes Boone’s face in both hands with such sudden care that Boone goes quiet under it.

Then Okee’s face breaks.

I’ve seen him through fevers and gunfights, hunger, fear, and pain that would bring lesser men to their knees, but I have never seen Okee cry.

Boone’s smile vanishes entirely. He stands there with his arms hanging at his sides like he has forgotten what they are for.

Okee draws a breath that catches on the way in.

“You are my home,” he says. “You are good. You are enough. More than enough. Do you understand me? You are wonderful, Boone. I love you. I love you exactly as you are.”

A tear slips down Okee’s cheek.

That seems to bring Boone back to himself. He reaches up and wipes it away with his thumb, clumsy and tender.

“I don’t give a damn what Collins thinks of me,” Boone says, his voice rough. “Long as you’re beside me, and Lula’s here making us miserable and keeping us fed, I got everything I need.”

Okee closes his eyes at that, like the words have struck him somewhere too deep to answer.

Boone opens one eye and reaches for me.

“Come here, wild.”

I go. His arm catches my waist and pulls me against them both. Okee’s hand finds the small of my back. I press one palm to his chest, over the hard pound of his heart.

“I apologize for inviting him in. I didn’t know he’d struck you.”

“Why do you think Okee chased him into the mud?”