Chapter 22
I’ll come home to you, I promise. Now you know it’s true, and so do I. I would never break a promise to you, pirate princess.
—A letter from Carson Wilder to Perry Bramble
C arson didn’t know what had happened. He felt like he had been gutted. Like he had been left to bleed out on the streets of Rustler Mountain. He couldn’t make sense of it.
It was …
He didn’t know how to give Perry what she was asking for. He …
You do. But you’re scared of what it will cost you .
He knew that he had to keep a piece of himself protected or when he lost the people he cared for, he’d fall apart. He would never again be a helpless child who had been too much for his own mother to handle.
He knew he had to be a hero, or he ruined everything he touched. His childhood, his marriage …
He knew …
There were reasons. There were reasons that he had done all of these things. And he … he couldn’t think of a damn one right then.
He found himself driving to Austin’s house. Because if anybody would understand, it was his brother. Because his brother was the one who had experienced the same loss that he had when they were children.
He knew what it was like to live in absolute despair when you lost the one parent you thought maybe loved you.
Austin had somehow healed and fallen in love and got married, and Carson didn’t know how to do that. He had gone through the motions once. Now he was doing it again, and he didn’t know what set those motions apart from feeling. Except that he didn’t have Perry …
He couldn’t breathe. He felt like he was bleeding.
He showed up at the front of the house clutching his chest.
“Have you been shot?” Austin asked as he jerked the door open.
“I fucking feel like I have,” he said.
His hands were shaking. Jesus.
He hadn’t even shaken like this when he’d had to walk out of the hospital without Alyssa.
Which made him feel guilty all over again because of how he’d failed her.
He’d tried. And Perry had had the nerve to look him right in the eye when he made a marriage proposal to her and tell him that he still wasn’t enough.
The problem was her . The problem was her and her inability to recognize that what they had was good enough. That what they had mattered. That was the problem. She was the problem.
“ She’s the problem,” he said.
“Perry?”
“Damn right. I proposed to her. She turned me down.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m not in love with her.”
“We had that whole conversation, and your takeaway was to propose and tell her you don’t love her?”
“No. That I’m not in love . I don’t even know what that is. I don’t even know …”
“You’re unhinged. Sit down.”
“What does that mean? I have been her best friend all her life.”
“Which means you should have known that offering to marry her without offering her your heart was going to blow up in your face.”
He growled. “Offering her something I can’t actually give her will blow up in my face?”
“Look at yourself. You think you don’t love her?”
“I’m afraid I can’t feel love. Not the way that other people do. And I won’t lie to her.”
Austin stared him down, as only an older brother could. “Are you afraid you can’t feel love, or afraid that you will?”
He frowned. “I don’t understand what you mean by that.”
“You’re afraid of how strong it is, and you’re trying to protect yourself.”
“I wanted to protect her from this .”
“From you? From you sitting here bleeding out over her rejecting you? This isn’t about you not feeling enough, asshole.
I think you’re protecting yourself. And I get it.
I did not want to fall in love with Millie.
I had a whole lot of excuses about how the town saw me.
How everyone saw our family. But they were just that— excuses.
Our childhood was really tough. It doesn’t exactly set you up for success.
And on top of that, you know so much about how vulnerable Perry was as a kid.
I’m not surprised at all that your inclination is to protect her. ”
Carson pressed his palm to his chest, to the devastated wound he felt there. “I’m worried something is dead. Inside me.”
“That you worry about it tells me everything I need to know.” Austin huffed a laugh. “Our dad never worried about how he treated us. Our mom left us without a backward glance. You’re neither one of them.” He paused for a moment. “And you’re in love with her.”
“If that were true, wouldn’t she know it? She wouldn’t have turned me down, because she would have sensed that I was in love with her.”
“No, you dumb fuck. That’s not the issue. The issue is that you’re going to have to explain to her why it never happened before. Why you married somebody else, and how the way you feel for her is different.”
“I …” He started trying to take a full breath and found that he could. “I don’t have any idea what to say to that. I really don’t.”
“I think you do. It’s not so much what’s happening now.
It’s that you have to repair the things that came before.
Because I’m just going to tell you, as your older brother, I think she’s always been the one.
I thought for a long time maybe you just didn’t feel romantic about her.
But I think anyone who knows you recognizes that Perry is your soulmate, whatever form that takes.
So yeah, I thought for a while there that maybe for the two of you that meant friendship.
But when you told me that you’d slept with her …
Listen, it’s none of my business, but I’m confused.
Did the physical attraction for her pop up after or … ”
“I didn’t want to feel it. I didn’t want to have it because … she would … wreck me. And I knew that. I fucking knew it, Austin. I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that loving that woman would destroy me.
“I didn’t want to ever lose Perry. I look at how Dad was, with women, with everything. I tried …”
“You tried to think your way into things that aren’t logical.
You tried to think your way into winning at life, but that’s the problem.
It’s messy, and it’s full of feelings. Think about it.
When you go to restore an old building, or a hope chest, or a wagon, you don’t know what you’re getting into until you actually get down to the substance of it, right? ”
He gritted his teeth. “Maybe.”
“No maybe. It’s true. Because I’ve heard you talk about it. So if you were to go over to the old Wilder building right now, you could take a cursory look around the place and make a plan, but until you actually started gutting it, you wouldn’t really know how much work there was to do.”
“True enough,” he said.
“That’s life, little brother. You can know things, and you can know what you want.
But you can never outsmart the part of living that is feeling.
Not ever. ’Cause that’s just how it works.
By trying to stay a step ahead of those feelings, you’re fixing the wrong things.
Sometimes you have to open up the walls and … take a chance.”
“That’s a bad metaphor, because you don’t even know what you’re looking for inside the walls.”
“No, I don’t. But you do. So you know what I’m trying to say.”
“I …”
The truth was, he knew exactly what his brother was trying to say.
And he also knew that it lined up with exactly what he had been feeling.
That in his bid to fix things, he had broken them.
That in his desire to be a good man, what he had really been trying to do was be a safe man.
Because he had seen something in Perry from the moment he had locked eyes on her—he had seen …
fate. That thing he tried so hard not to believe in.
Soulmates … he had never wanted to believe that was true.
Because it would mean there was just one person out there for you, and if you messed it up, you could never be happy.
And if he couldn’t be enough for Perry, and he lost her, then he would be nothing.
He had deliberately chosen the easier things.
Without realizing it. He had chosen the military because it had been easier than staying in Rustler Mountain and trying to build his restoration business, trying to show that he was good through the work of his hands.
He had decided to do it by being a soldier.
By wearing a uniform that everyone esteemed.
And he had …
Perry wasn’t wrong about the letters. The letters.
She had said that she’d sent him one that hadn’t been opened.
It made him feel like such an ass. He hadn’t opened it because he had started dating Alyssa. They had gotten engaged so fast because it felt imperative, because part of him had known …
All this time, he had been putting obstacles in front of asking Perry Bramble to be his wife, and he had been running out of excuses. Running out of reasons.
Maybe that was the real reason he went into the military. To run away. So that he didn’t have to face the truth about loving her. About wanting her.
Maybe that was the substance of it.
He felt all the color drain from his face. All the blood drain from his body.
“You’ve been lying to yourself for a long time, I think,” said Austin.
“What should I do?”
“I think that’s the thing: You have to start being honest. Brutally honest. With yourself, with Perry. You have to. Anything less is doing her a disservice. Anything less is what got you here in the first place. If you weren’t trying to protect yourself, what would you have done?”
“I have to think about it.”
“Then think about it. But you’ve already had twenty-five years.
So don’t keep thinking too long.” Carson felt …
undone. Austin reached out and put his hand on his shoulder.
“You made some mistakes. Join the club. Maybe you weren’t always a hero.
The question is, what are you going to do with that?
There are things that you can’t make amends for, and I get that.
But you have to live. You have to let go. ”
“But … if I don’t … I don’t have to change anything.”
“Life is change, little brother. I’m sorry to say.”
Carson thought that was bullshit.