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“Oh.”
“Yeah. Went through a divorce a few years back. Looking to start over.”
“Well, now I feel bad. Because I guess you can’t really tell who has it all together. And a lot of people make mistakes...hedge their bets on the wrong guy.”
“People lie about who they are,” he said. “And accidents happen. And even when people are a hundred percent truthful about who they are, it doesn’t mean it’s that easy to get away. Look at my family. It took a lot to get rid of the poison that was here. It happens. We make bad mistakes with people sometimes and...”
“I mean, at least Elizabeth was married to him, I guess.”
“And you’re married to me,” he said. “So I don’t see the issue.”
“Gus,” she said, then she reached out and patted him on the hand. “You’re sweet.”
And he felt...somewhat emasculated by that comment.
Lucky for her his masculinity wasn’t fragile, or it might’ve done some serious damage.
“I’msweet?”
“You married me to protect me, and now you’re reassuring me. Of the nine thousand things that have come up in this conversation. My insecurity around someone like Elizabeth, and obviously my deep insecurity of the fact that I did something...rash and idiotic. You’re protecting me. And you’re protecting the baby. And...yeah. You’re sweet.”
“I’m not fucking sweet, Alaina.”
She grinned from her position on the horse. “Why is that such a challenge to you?”
“Because no one else treats me like that.”
“Maybe no one else has ever seen the real you. Not that you show it to me constantly,” she said. “I feel like I get glimpses of him daily. Even though I do have an ugly sugar shaker now.”
“Wench.”
She smiled and got off her horse, and he did the same. Then they walked toward the first cabin and opened it up. It had been entirely gutted. The wiring pulled out of the walls, and rewired. They’d hired a professional for that, but he and his brothers were going to be working on Sheetrock and texture this week.
“Wow,” she said, looking around the hollowed-out shell. “I can see where they have a lot of potential.”
“Yeah. That way it’ll be a nice place for people who come here and do short-or long-term stays.”
She looked at him, those green eyes too bright and too sharp. They’d always been like that. She’d always been like that.
“Would you have wanted to come to a place like this?” she asked.
She’d always been a bold thing, but she’d never talked to him about anything this personal.
She had gotten closer to the heart of all of it than anyone else had. People thought that it was a smart business venture. They knew that part of him wanted to reach out and do something, since this land had been the site of so much violence and sadness. That he wanted to give it a different legacy.
But he never talked about the way it made him think about that thirteen-year-old boy who’d been so badly wounded. That thirteen-year-old boy that had felt lost and scared and alone and struggled with nightmares, struggled with fear. With increasingly feeling isolated from the people around him.
“I couldn’t find a lot of happiness after what happened,” he said.
“I don’t really know the story,” she said.
And it all kind of caught in his throat. Because he and his brothers just didn’t talk about it as a matter of course. And the whole rest of Four Corners seemed happy to let it be a myth. Maybe a murderer. Maybe a monster. And he knew that his appearance added to that.
He also knew that in the telling of the whole story, it revealed that there was only one monster in the McCloud family.
Just the one.
Just the one that let it all go free.
