Page 116 of This Wild Heart

“You already know what it is.”

“Ugh, you’re so patient. Just … yell at me and tell me how dumb it was.”

Dad tamped down a smile. “Not gonna do that, kiddo. It won’t help anything.”

It didn’t take me long to give him the answer he wanted me to say out loud. That was one of his gifts too. “The hard part is that we have to stop lying to ourselves.”

“Got it in one,” he replied softly.

I rolled my eyes, which made him chuckle. “I feel like I’m being pretty honest with myself, though.”

His smile faded slowly. “Are you?” he asked.

It was never fun to have someone hold up a mirror at moments like this one. It was only natural that we wouldn’t see the thing we wanted. That the reflection would be distorted and warped, that the truth we couldn’t force ourselves to say out loud would somehow make it worse.

Was I being honest with myself? About everything?

In just a few short weeks, everything about my life was whisked around and poured back out, unrecognizable from what it had been as recently as a month ago. Spliced together with the good was the heartbreak. His and mine. His was bigger, harder to deal with. Laying this all at Parker’s feet—with his grief as the stage—wasn’t fair. It was about me, too.

“I thought I could fix him,” I admitted quietly. Dad sat and listened, and the build of my tears climbing up my throat was hot and thick and horrible. “I pretended it was all about Max, and why I’d stayed and how badly that rocked me, especially at the end. But it wasn’t.” No more lying to myself, not if I wanted to come out the other side of this and be able to look myself in the eye, with the reflection staring back at me clear and crisp. “Loving Parker wasn’t enough. And I thought it would be.”

“We can’t ever love someone so much that we fix their problems, kid. You’re setting yourself up for a world of hurt if you do that. It doesn’t mean we have to stop loving them or force ourselves to walk away, but you have to be honest with yourself about what’s going to come from it if you stay.”

“He doesn’t want me to stay,” I said. “He doesn’t want anyone getting dragged down in the stuff he’s still trying to fix.”

“Is that one of his lies?”

I pulled in a slow breath, meant to fortify, but when I let it out, all it seemed to do was fill the room with a sad, yearning sort of sound. “I think so.”

He tilted his chin up. “The two of you had to contend with a lot of those, it seems like. It’s hard to build a relationship that way.”

I pulled my knees up to my chest, hugging my arms around the front of my legs. “We were though,” I said quietly. “Building something, at least.”

“Sounds like you were.”

“But how are you supposed to know when someone’s lying to themselves and when it’s real? There’s no blinking sign over our head when we’re pretending. Sometimes we don’t even know it ourselves.”

He made a small noise of agreement. “That’s the trick, isn’t it? What’s your gut tell you?”

I scoffed lightly. “Not sure I can trust that right now.”

“Of course you can.”

Dad sounded so sure, so certain. Hooray for him.

Must be freaking nice.

“Now you’re pretending like you don’t know,” he said, nudging my leg with his.

I groaned, laying my head back on the couch. “It’s telling me that Parker is completely and utterly full of shit when he says he doesn’t want love, but he doesn’t know how to back out of it. He’s said it so many times that he believes it now. Just like he’s told himself that he needs to punish himself for the past, punish himself for making the wrong decisions. And that’s what he’s doing now … he’s punishing himself again.” My nose did that tingling thing again, and I tried to breathe through the hot press of tears, but it was like trying to hold back the ocean with the palm of my hand. “He’s so easy to love, Dad.”

His hand coasted along the back of my head. “So are you, kid.” When a tear fell, I swiped it away quickly. Dad cleared his throat. “If I thought it would help, I’d go talk to him myself.”

I laughed, the sound watery and full. “Yeah, I bet you would.”

“Not like that,” he said with a slight eye roll. “I understand where he’s coming from, you know? Isabel scared the shit out of me when I first met her. I lied to myself for a long time that I couldn’t let myself love her. That she was too young, that we didn’t know each other well enough, that I had to focus on you.” His hand came up, and he tweaked my chin. “You’re the one who knew right away. You knew she was the right one for our family.”

I wiped at more tears. “Well, I’m very smart.”

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