Bethany was right. He should tell her. But they were still so new. What if this was all too much too fast?
Her stomach growled.
“I want to make you breakfast,” he told her. “Maybe after we talk to Magic.”
“I’m okay. I’m used to going longer without food.”
His jaw clenched and he had to work to speak. “I don’t want that for you anymore.”
They walked in silence and he could sense the tornado of thoughts swirling over her head.
“I chose this, you know? Being a mountain woman. I wanted this.”
“Why?”
More silence. More thinking. He was patient. He could wait.
“When I was twenty-one, something bad happened to my family.” She paused. “Well, actually, something bad happened because of my family. You ever hear of the Destacios?”
Eagan shook his head.
She gave a sideways grin. “Good. Then I traveled far enough away.”
He pulled her out of the way of a rock in the path.
“My family was wealthy, rich off the real estate market. My father was the breadwinner, but my mother had the brains. Investing, selling, investing again. They—we—were swimming in extravagant crap we didn’t need.” She smiled. “I remember even as a teenager thinking, this is too much. So much. We don’t need it.” She shook her head. “I was weird even then.”
“Not weird,” he murmured. “Sensible.”
“Yeah. Maybe.” She sighed, and he squeezed her hand to urge her to continue. “‘This money is a poison,’ my dad would say, as he spent it on booze, ‘I might as well drink it away’. And nobody cared because we were busy ourselves, doing things that didn’t matter. Spending money that didn’t matter. Wasting time that mattered, but we didn’t know it yet. Preoccupied. Self-absorbed. Blind.”
She shook her head, looking pained. Eagan wanted to erase that look from her face and never see it there again.
“One night, he and my mama and my abuela went to dinner. They all had too much to drink, but papa drove home anyway.”
Oh, shit. He had a bad feeling he knew where this was going. He pulled Clara to a stop and turned her to face him. She stared at the ground as the rest of the story tumbled out.
“He blasted through an intersection, t-boning a car with an entire family inside. He was going twenty over the speed limit. The daughter was driving the other car. Just got her learner’s permit. She… she was the only survivor between the two cars. In an instant, in a breath, her whole family was gone. And why? Because my father had a few too many and decided to drive?” She shook her head so hard her hair flew, and Eagan smelled the rank scent of tears. “No. See, it isn’t that simple. Basic. Break it down to basics. That family died because my family, I, my sister, my mama, even my grandparents, were too damn busy with life to see how dangerous my papa was. We didn’t care that he was ruining his life one bottle at a time. We didn’t care until he ruined seven other lives.”
She stopped, breathing heavy with the weight of her confession.
“Then…” she gasped, and tears exploded from her.
Eagan drew her close, angry and wanting to fight away her demons, but unable to do anything but hold her. Shit.
“Then we cared,” she sobbed. “Then things became simple. The way to prevent it clear, if only we could have seen it earlier. I went to see her one time, the daughter, to tell her sorry. Do you know what she said to me? She said, ‘There is nothing to forgive. This wasn’t your fault.’ But she was wrong.” Clara cried into his shoulder. “I needed things to be basic, simple. I needed to be alone and to think, and to realize how little I could survive on. How little I needed money. How very little I needed period. I didn’t need a bed or TV or a bank account or… or… relationships. Life became easy and I could let go of the guilt. So much guilt.”
Pieces of his mate’s puzzle began to click into place, and the picture it revealed gutted him.
“Aw, baby, this isn’t on you. Or your family. Your daddy was a grown-ass man. Who made lots of choices that brought him to that point in time, at that intersection.”
She shook her head. “We could have made a difference.”
“Maybe so. But…” Her way of thinking was inspiring. When he looked at it closely, it was so very much like an animal’s. The basics. Instinct. Need. And purpose. “…but at base, isn’t every person’s choice ultimately their own? Doesn’t each of us have to take responsibility for what mark we leave on the world?”
She pulled back, wiping her eyes, her brow furrowed. “That’s… true. But—”