Chapter Twenty-One
When she woke up it was still dark outside. Crazy, because she and Denver had probably been up until two in the morning. And
then . . .
He was still asleep, his arm wrapped around her. They hadn’t had sex last night.
She lay there next to him, just listening to his deep, even breathing.
They hadn’t fallen into bed and made love and fallen asleep because an orgasm was the best sleeping pill available.
They had gotten into bed to be together. Hold each other. They had slept together because it was better than sleeping apart.
She had opened up a vein last night. And he had just listened.
She got out of bed, and he didn’t stir. She made her way over to the window and looked out. The moon was full, the sky clear,
and she could see it reflecting on the bright snow all over the ground. She had never let herself think of all those good
memories. She had never let herself go there, because it was just too painful.
Because she had decided a long time ago that love was a weakness. Both in her and in her dad. She had done her best to get rid of that weakness.
She wasn’t weak for loving her dad.
The thought was enough to make her dizzy as she stared down at that snow-covered ground.
Feelings didn’t make you weak.
Maybe that was the only reason her dad had ever been strong in any capacity with them.
She had been so disappointed with his shortcomings that she had erased everything that he ever did. Everything he had ever
tried to do. He hadn’t done Christmas just for himself. He did it for them.
He hadn’t kept his girls and tried to raise them after his wife had left because he didn’t care. His caring had been imperfect.
Because he had been very flawed. He had failed them.
In so many ways.
He had never pretended to be reformed. None of that had been pretending.
Not the perfect or the imperfect.
It wasn’t that the weakness was real but the strength wasn’t.
And perhaps, the love he had for his kids was the strongest thing he possessed.
She wasn’t going to go twisting and turning to make him a hero. But he was maybe a little more than she had ever believed.
Because maybe love was a little more than she had let herself believe.
It was what had kept her going after he died.
The love for her sisters.
The love that had been stored in that house up until that point. A tear slid down her cheek, and another.
She looked back at Denver, and her heart nearly shattered. She loved him.
That was what she’d been trying to avoid this whole time.
Like it was a plague. Because it could make her weak.
That was what she had believed. She had seen all the ways that love had made her feel weak and broken in the past, and that was the narrative she had given herself about it, because it was just easier.
It was never the love that hurt. Not really. It was all the things around it.
That day her father had died, she had looked at Denver King, and she had seen something. Deep down in her soul, she had known
something.
She was glad she hadn’t figured out what it was then.
She had needed to wait.
To struggle, to succeed, to fail. To get her sisters raised and out into the world. She had needed to build herself up, and
find all the ways that she could be strong alone.
It had brought her to this point. To this point where she could finally remember all of the things about her childhood. Where
she could accept its complexity. The good and the bad.
Yes. All those years had been important. But they had brought her here. To his bedroom, to his bed.
She had told herself that her dream was to leave. To get far away from here. She was glad that she hadn’t done that yet. Because
there had been healing to do that could only have happened in this place.
She had felt like Four Corners might be magic when Denver had brought her here for the first time.
Maybe that was the poetry in all of this.
Her father had allowed his life to be torn apart by Elias King.
And Denver King was the piece that built her life into the strongest it had ever been.
She was tired. But she knew she wasn’t going to sleep for the rest of the night.
When Denver woke up, there was a mug of coffee sitting on the nightstand.
He sat up, and realized he was alone in bed. “Sheena?”
He looked around the room, then heard footsteps coming down the hall. She appeared in the doorway, holding her own mug. “Good
morning.”
“Morning.”
“It’s about time you woke up,” she said.
“Were you waiting for me?”
She smiled. A strange smile that he couldn’t read. “Yes. I think I was.”
“Last night was amazing,” he said.
“We didn’t even have sex,” she said.
He frowned. “I know. That’s not what I meant.”
“Yeah. I know. I was actually thinking about how amazing it was that even without sex it was . . .”
“Are you okay?”
“I need to tell you something,” she said.
“Yeah, sure.”
“I realized something last night. I realized a lot of things last night. But the most important one is that I know what this
is.”
“What’s that?” he asked before he could think about whether or not he really wanted to know. He asked before he really sat
there and looked at her eyes. Before he had a chance to be afraid of what she might say next.
“This is one of those forever kind of things. It was from the beginning. We didn’t want to put a name on it, didn’t want to
put a label on it because we both knew that. We both knew that we were dealing with something a whole lot bigger than we had
ever dealt with before, and I know that’s why I completely freaked out. Because it was never just sex, was it?”
“No,” he said. His chest felt sore. She was right, though. It had never been just sex. It was impossible to believe that. A lot of women had come and gone from his life, fleeting, and not remembered. There had always been more to their connection.
“I love you,” she said.
The first words that came to his mind, to his lips, that he held back and refused to speak were I will fail you.
He knew that. Felt it out of the depths of his soul. But he couldn’t say anything. Not right then. Not in that moment. Because
he was just staring at her. This beautiful, strong woman who had come into his world and changed it in so many ways, culminating
in last night when . . .
It was like everybody thought he should just be done now. Like he was accomplished. Like he had finished everything. Like
he should just tell Sheena that he loved her too, and they could get married, and they could play house. They could have a
couple of kids, and . . .
And he would rest. And what would happen then?
Would he want to get away from it all sometimes? Would he drink a little bit too much? Would he twist himself all up in knots
and convince himself that he deserved a break?
Would he be that version of himself that wanted to indulge every selfish whim?
Because that was the only thing he could imagine across the finish line.
“Sheena . . . I told you already. I can’t.”
“Yes. And I told you that I couldn’t. I really believed it.
Denver, I thought that love was weak. I thought it made you weak.
I thought it was something that weak people used to try and erase all of the terrible things that they did.
Like my dad could say that he loved me, and it would erase the fact that he went on a two-day bender and left us by ourselves.
Like it would erase the fact that he failed to listen to me, to protect me.
That is not what it is. Love is that heaviness.
It’s that thing that you and I took on when we were far too young.
That thing that drove us to raise our siblings, even though it was hard.
For us, love was never weak. For us, it was our strength.
It’s why we’re here. It’s why I took your money and I sent my sisters to college, and I didn’t go.
It’s why I waited and waited to even try to fulfill my own dreams. It’s why you have done nothing but work tirelessly to atone for what your father did. ”
He shook his head. “That’s guilt for me. I don’t need to speak for you, Sheena, and I don’t want to. But I’ve always known
that love was strong. It was strong enough to exploit the weaknesses inside myself, and if I don’t stay on top of those weaknesses,
then I don’t know when they’re going to come out again. Because my father took them and he used them. But he could never have
done that if I didn’t love him. Yeah, I always knew that love was strong. That love and loyalty when twisted could topple
an entire community. I lived it.”
“So what does that mean? What does that look like for you? What would your life be?”
“If I just stick to my responsibilities. If I never let myself get complacent. If I . . .”
“What are you afraid of?”
“Being him,” he said. “Hurting somebody the way that he hurt people.”
“It can’t be true,” she said.
“No. I already told you . . .”
“That’s a story you tell yourself, Denver.
That you might hurt people because he liked to gamble?
The difference between you and your father .
. . There are so many differences between you and your father.
But let’s take the gambling. The drinking.
The sex. You did that away from home. You did it in casinos.
Where everybody there was on equal footing.
And in fact, it was entirely possible that you came from less.
Less power, less money. You drank where it was appropriate to drink.
You had sex with women who wanted you. Who didn’t owe you money or any of the other suspect reasons your father was able to get women into bed with him?
The venue, the circumstances, that matters. You can’t erase them.”
Her words destabilized him. Shifted the ground beneath his feet. And he wasn’t even standing. He was still lying in bed, that
cup of coffee getting colder and colder on the nightstand.
“You look at life as what you want to,” he said. “But I have to look at it the way that it makes sense to me. For me. And