he believes he has a claim on your father’s house. It’s likely he’ll come here.”
It wasn’t the first time Rory had thought of it. In the back of his mind, he’d kept a mental countdown of when Burton would be up for release. He was sure his mother had done the same. Unfortunately, that timetable had just been stepped up by a couple years. He expected the state didn’t want to have to pay for cancer treatments. Easier to put him on a sex offender list and cut a dying man loose.
Despite Daralyn’s calm words, hearing that her uncle might set up house here had made her face pale, and put a tremor in her suddenly stiff body. Having him in the same county, only a few miles down the road, knowing she might run into him while on her bike, at the store, at community events?
That sure as fuck wasn’t going to happen.
He thought of her coming to him in his room, getting him to the hospital. When strength had been needed, she’d found it. She’d always found it.
But there were certain things she could expect from him, that he would handle, and nothing she said or did could keep him from it.
Still holding onto Daralyn, he used one hand to push the couple of feet to the bed and take his mother’s hand. Then he looked up into his girl’s face and met her gaze with a solid and steady one of his own.
“Let him come,” he said. “We’ll deal with it.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
It was mid-morning when the text came in on his phone. Rory glanced at it, lifted a hand to catch Johnny’s attention. It also drew Ralph Peterson’s, who was here to pick up some fire ant powder. “About forty-five minutes,” he told them.
The two men stopped what they were doing. Peterson headed out to his truck and Johnny turned the sign to Closed. About that time, Daralyn came out of the back. Her expression told him she’d heard him.
As she approached the front counter, Rory put his hand out on it, and she put hers in his grasp. Her eyes were thoughtful and dark, an abyss. He tightened his hold, telling her he had her.
“If it was my choice, you know I’d tell you to stay here,” he said. “But it isn’t.”
He’d wanted to make it his. Only a talk with his mother had kept him from being an idiot about it. He’d brought it up with her one night when Daralyn was at school. He’d discussed it from several angles, but then it had boiled down to one major point.
“That first year, when I was hurt, you didn’t want me out of your sight,” he’d said, meeting his mother’s gaze over the dinner table. “I’m ashamed how I let you wait on me hand and foot, not realizing how much more helpless it was making me feel. Not your fault. You did it out of love. But I’m afraid of doing the same to her, Mom.”
“What snapped you out of it?” she’d asked sagely.
“Marcus, when he threw the bag of grain at me—”
“Yes,” she interrupted. “That was the straw. But it had been happening before then. You were getting more irritable, more restless. Even caught up in your head, there was a part of you that knew your own heart, the man you wanted to be. That you wouldn’t deny yourself. The man you are.”
She met his gaze, smiled. “Marcus’s challenge to you was the catalyst, but it was one you were ready to hear, in that moment. And we all learned something important. To trust the strength you had within you to set your own path the way it was meant to go.”
Reaching across the table, she put her hand on his. “You need to trust her the same way, despite how protective you are.” A fond smile crossed her face, one that spoke of the woman she was, as well as a mother. “Your father was the same. Didn’t even want me to go up a ladder without him being right there with me.
“The men of this family have always been strong, traditional men, but with room in their hearts for change. Through love and the sense God gave you, and your mother and father encouraged you to have, to think for yourselves.”
While he and Daralyn discussed it several times over the past couple weeks, him trying his best not to be that “traditional man,” he hadn’t pushed her to make a decision,