Chapter 35
Hunter
O ne thing about Devyn is you know when she’s pissed.
And right now, she is really fuckin’ pissed. At me.
“I’m sorry.” I grip the steering wheel tighter. “I shouldn’t have blamed you for what happened back there. I just…there’re things I haven’t told you about yet, and I—”
Devyn whips her neck to face me, nothing but narrow slits where her bright round eyes usually appear, and she cuts me off with that look alone. The words she says after sting, but the look on her face when she says them is heartbreaking. I’ve wounded her. I’ve betrayed some of the trust we’ve carefully built back up.
And I watch as she painstakingly slides those concrete slabs back in place, the invisible ones she wedges between us when it’s too much to face skin to skin. The ones she thinks I can’t see plain as day.
I see you, babygirl. I’ve always seen you.
“You blamed me. Do you know how bad that hurts?” She grits her teeth to get the message out, but it’s her eyes I’m still stuck on, the shining orbs that are so close to spilling over, I might see it again this time. Two times in one night I will have made her cry. I’ve fucked up.
“You don’t understand what power Garrison holds in this town, Dev,” I whisper, checking the rearview mirror to see Jonathan staring out the window. I don’t want him to hear me talk about his dad. A conversation like this one is better off happening later. At home. Even if Devyn doesn’t understand that.
“Can we talk about this when we’re home?”
“Your home, you mean?”
Her words slice me open. I’ve come to think of it as our home. Of her as my girl.
Of us as a family.
“It’s our home. And I was wrong to make you feel anything to the contrary.” I hope she can read my eyes the same way I can hers.
Do you see me? I beg her with my stare.
“This isn’t the first time these two have had problems, and Ellie is one strike away from getting in serious trouble for it. I panicked when I saw you brought the evidence of their fight right to the very person who could act against her.”
“All I was trying to do was help her out of something she got herself into when nobody else was there to do it, Hunter. She was hurt. And scared. Hell, they’d already made up by the time I got there. We were just taking Jonathan and the cow back home when we found Garrison.”
I grab her hand and cock my head slightly toward Jonathan behind us, and Dev gets the message. She stops, maneuvering her words away from Jonathan’s living demons.
But she’s still my girl. Tough and unrelenting. So, she gives it to me all the same.
“You haven’t even asked about the cow.” This part is loud enough for the kids to hear.
“What the hell’s the damn cow got to do with this?” I ask, earning twin groans from the back seat and a look of pure outrage from Devyn.
“You know what?” she says, threading her hands through her hair and facing forward again. Away from me.
I don’t like it.
“I’ve been assaulted, frightened, and blamed enough for one night,” she drops her voice to a whisper, “but what I’m madder about is that little girl back there, she needed me, and I tried to do the right thing in your absence, but what you seem to be implying is that I should have stayed out of it. No matter how close we’ve grown, no matter that the whole town thinks we’re one big married happy family and you’ve asked both Ellie and me to go along with this. But it’s not my business, right? Because she’s not my kid? And by those standards, Hunter Isaac, this isn’t our home…it’s yours. I’m just a part of it you made some space for.”
My heart breaks the way they say it does in all those books she reads. It’s not a metaphor. I feel it, the tense pain between each crack that splinters through my chest at the thought of her not belonging right here with me. With us.
“That is not at all how I feel, Devyn. I love you. This whole place is made better because you’re here. Because you’re you . I don’t just want you in my world, Dev. I need you in it.”
I look back at the kids. We’ve been whispering, but fuck knows they heard every damn word from the looks on their faces. And they have been through enough tonight. Most importantly, I need to talk to Devyn about stuff Ellie doesn’t need to hear. It’s time to come clean about everything if I don’t want it all to come crumbling down on me.
I put the truck in park and turn to the kids. “Can you two get settled in with some leftover pizza in the kitchen while we talk?”
“No!” Ellie snaps, and I angle my shocked face to meet a spiteful glare. “I’m not going anywhere until you two make up. You can’t blame Devyn for something that’s between me and Jonathan and our own fists.”
“You mean your fists,” Jonathan interrupts, gesturing to his bruised and bloodied self, and earning an exhausted sigh from Ellie.
“Anyway,” she rolls her eyes and continues, “we already forgave each other.” She shoots a glance at Jonathan to let that sink in again, and I try not to laugh. She’ll be all right.
“It wasn’t her fault we stole the cow, either.”
“Ellie, the house,” I grind out. But she only bucks back at me, holding her chin up higher and daring me to make her leave. This is what happens when you raise a strong-willed kid. I rub my temples and exhale, relenting because I haven’t the strength to fight her tonight.
“Hunter, you and I,” Dev reaches back and links pinkies with Ellie, smiling, “and Ellie. We’ve become a family. And I can’t spend every single day with this amazing child who belongs to the man I love and not feel like she’s a daughter to me. But tonight felt very much like you against me. Will that be what it’s like? Will I be an outsider, no matter how I weave myself into all of this?”
“No, Dev, not at all.” I sigh, not knowing how to best explain it, but I have to try. “That’s just the thing, she isn’t your daughter.”
Her mouth pops open, and I can see the pain there. Pain caused by my words, but I can’t lessen that pain for her. I can’t even do it for me. And if she wants this, with us, with me and Ellie, then she has to know that. None of this life comes free from pain.
I lean closer, cupping her cheek to soften my words so she’ll hear them for what they are. They aren’t meant to hurt her. They’re just facts. Facts we unfortunately don’t get to ignore as Ellie’s guardians.
“I don’t mean that in the emotional sense,” I tell her, pulling my hand down to hold hers over the console. “But in the straight, legal, factual sense that I have never gotten the luxury of ignoring where Ellie is concerned, there are things you don’t know that you aren’t thinking about. Things that—”
“Well, maybe if you’d tell me! Trust me with all these secrets you guard so closely. I tried to be a sounding board for this earlier in the week and you brushed me off. I get that you don’t feel like you can totally open to me about everything, but I wish you’d see how much I’ve had to lay myself bare to be able to trust you again. Fuck, Hunter, Lemon knows more than I do. And what the fuck happened to Garrison while I was gone, huh, the fuck was that?” She braces herself on the center console for support. “I can’t do this if we don’t trust each other enough to share life’s problems. Lord knows we aren’t done facing them.”
She’s right.
I haven’t trusted her. She found out about Ellie on her own, she has no idea about her father, and worst of all, I still haven’t told her about the fact that our marriage is—and could stay—very real, if she wants. Because I’ve been so worried about if she doesn’t want that. And what that could mean for me and Ellie. This whole time I’ve been trying to bring her back into the folds of Pine Forest and work her into my perfectly crafted life, assuming that was enough because of love.
But she’s been in complete darkness.
She’s sat and timed Ellie’s skills with Lyle, increased our score for trivia nights at Sugar Stable tenfold since joining our team thanks to all her random news facts. Hell, she’s even building up a pageant program with one of her oldest rivals.
She’s been there for us even after I revealed a secret fucking kid and has made no plans to move back home after the fair.
“Papa?” Ellie says softly. “I’m…not your daughter, either, you know.” She scrunches her little nose as she says it. I don’t know if she’s trying to soften the blow, or if she’s just now hearing how that sounds for the first time.
“No, I could never be Samuel, and I’m sorry, but that’s a good thing, Ellie. You are who you are because of what you come from, and you can’t change that, but you can use that power in any way you like. I used mine to make a life for us. Me and you. But there was a time when I almost didn’t. I almost used it for an early ticket to my grave. For fighting. To satisfy my anger and fear.”
She sniffles, and I know she won’t want me to see her cry, she’s a lot like Dev that way, but I look her in the eyes all the same, because everyone is getting the truth from me tonight.
No more secrets.
“Even if you aren’t my daughter by technicalities, you are mine because there’s a place in my heart that you fit indefinitely. You started off as my reason for healing, Ellie. But you’ve become my reason for being. And I will never stop fighting to make sure you stay right here. Exactly where you belong.”
Ellie throws her arms around me from the back seat, burying a tear-streaked face into my shoulder.
“I love you always, Eleanor Rosemary. I promise I’ll make this right for us,” I whisper into her hair. This time, only she can hear me, and she nods, trusting me to do just that. To make it right, to earn back Devyn’s love and her trust.
She sniffs, wiping her face on her sleeve and nodding twice.
“Thank you for helping us rescue Porkloin,” she tells Dev, then flicks her focus to me and raises a brow before directing her attention back at Devyn.
“Even if you aren’t my mother by technicalities, there’s a place in my heart that you fit indefinitely .”
She hugs Devyn from behind, winks at me, and scoots out of the truck, hopping from the bed with a crunch of gravel beneath her boots as she runs after her friend.
Message received, loud and clear.