Chapter 4 #2
“Yeah.” He wiped his palm across his face, and she pretended not to notice the moisture it left behind.
“And now everyone in Solace looks at me like I’m some kind of monster.
Even the people who’ve known me my whole life.
They cross the street when they see me coming.
Like I might just snap and kill someone else for no reason. ”
Johanna let the silence stretch for a moment, measuring her response carefully, all too aware that the wrong words now would cause him to rebuild his walls.
She’d already gotten more out of him in the last few minutes than she thought possible, which told her he’d needed this.
Despite all of his bluster and protests to the contrary, he’d needed someone to talk to.
“That’s what happened,” she said finally. “Not who you are.”
Boone’s head jerked up, his eyes flashing between anger and desperate hope. “What’s the difference?”
“All the difference in the world.” She shifted to face him. “What happened that night was terrible. But it doesn’t define you. Not unless you let it.”
“Easy for you to say. You don’t have to live with it.”
“No,” she acknowledged. “But I have my own mistakes to live with.”
He scoffed. “Did you kill someone?”
Nick.
It hit too close to home, and she let Boone see the truth of it in her expression.
“I might as well have. Someone I cared about took his own life, and I was partly responsible for the circumstances that led him there. I carry that with me.” She touched her chest. “I’ll always carry it with me, but it’s not a weight that has to crush me.
It took me a long time to realize that, but I’m trying not to let it define me anymore. ”
“How?” The question seemed to surprise him as much as it did her, a crack in his carefully constructed armor.
“By forgiving myself. By understanding that one moment—even a life-altering one—isn’t the sum total of who I am.” She paused, weighing whether to share more, but she’d already come this far. ‘You can’t unsaddle halfway,’ as her grandpa always used to say. “And by finding purpose again.”
Boone was quiet for a long time, staring at the now nearly empty bottle. If that had been even half full when he started, he was going to have a hell of a hangover in the morning.
The cigarette had burned down between his fingers again. He took one last drag before crushing it out.
“I don’t deserve forgiveness,” he said finally.
“Who says?” she asked. “God? Because I hear He’s big on the whole forgiveness thing.
Crystal? Honestly, what does it matter what she thinks of you?
From the sounds of it, she has her own demons to battle.
The town? Your uncle? The same goes. You could be sainted, and they’d still see you as the troublemaking Callahan boy. ”
He flinched as if she’d struck him, then his face hardened. The vulnerability she’d glimpsed was gone, replaced by a wall of anger.
“Me.” He shoved to his feet and glowered down at her from his considerable height. “I’m the one who says. I say I don’t deserve forgiveness.”
“Exactly.” She looked up at him and offered a soft smile. “That’s exactly it. You’re the only one holding yourself back, Boone. Nobody else. Once you forgive yourself, the rest will fall into place.”
Boone snapped up the lantern, turned on his heel without another word, and stalked toward the door.
“I’m not the one who needs fixing,” he called over his shoulder, voice thick with anger and whiskey. “Maybe you should worry about Nash instead of me.”
The barn door slammed behind him, leaving her alone in the darkness.
Johanna sighed and pulled herself to her feet, brushing hay from her clothes. Her hands were numb with cold, and she longed for the warmth of her cabin. As she walked across the yard, she glanced back at the barn.
Boone had stopped halfway to the bunkhouse.
He stood motionless in the falling snow, bottle in one hand, lantern in the other, looking for all the world like a man caught between two equally impossible choices.
Then he shook his head once, as if answering some internal question, and dumped the remaining whiskey into the snow.
He disappeared into the darkness, the light from his lantern fading as he trudged toward the bunkhouse.
Progress.
She smiled to herself as an idea took shape. What Boone needed wasn’t more therapy, more talking about his pain. What he needed was a way to channel it, to make meaning from it.
Her gaze drifted back to the barn with all of its empty stalls. Walker had mentioned wanting to bring in rescue horses eventually. Therapy animals.
“A lot of guys don’t talk, but they’ll talk to a horse,” he’d said.
Maybe he was on to something there. Maybe what Boone needed wasn’t someone to fix him, but something to fix. Something—or someone—to care for that wasn’t just his ailing mother or his own damaged soul.
She turned the thought over in her mind and continued to her cabin through the deepening snow. And by the time she closed her door against the cold, she knew exactly what she needed to do tomorrow.