“Whatever it took,” I answered.
He shook his head. “No, darlin’, easy to say, harder to do.”
“I don’t mean it was easy, I mean I would do it.”
“You wouldn’t.”
“You can’t know that.”
“I can. You were raised by Silas and Sondra Goodknight. You would make the right choice. I was raised by Trane and Valerie Keaton. I made the wrong one.”
“You made the only choice.”
“In hindsight, everything seems clear but at the time, it was not and I had choices. I just didn’t make the right ones.”
“You loved her and your hand was forced. It took you a while but you eventually saw your way clear and got the town clear and, incidentally, it’s debatable if that was the right choice since I can assume it made her more vulnerable than she already is.”
“And before that, Faye, I beat a man into givin’ me shit he was holdin’ over a bunch of men who didn’t deserve that effort.”
I felt my flinch and saw his face get harder when he caught it but I powered through.
“You did it for Valerie.”
“I did wrong.”
“You did what you had to do.”
“Yeah, and it… was… wrong.”
But I’d had enough.
And so had Chace.
It was time to break through.
“God!” I threw up my hands, losing it. “Do you not understand that the power behind the love of your actions for your mother and, what you don’t get, Chace, also for your father is a beautiful thing you should be proud of?”
His body locked.
I didn’t catch it. I was on a mission and was already too far gone.
“Do you not think that I don’t think that, if you loved me that much, if you turned your back on everything that was you in order to protect me, that I wouldn’t love you more? Love you more because you loved me so much you’d do everything you could to keep me safe? Even going so far as losing you? But what you don’t get, Chace, is that you never lost you. What they did was wrong. What you did was right.”
Chace didn’t move, not even to twitch and I still didn’t catch it.
I was on a roll.
“If you made another decision because you were all fired up to be the man you had to be, to protect the future you wanted, that would have been selfish. The choice you had was no choice at all. Save someone you love from a breakdown or save a town and your own ass. You’ve lived your whole fraking life protecting her. You’d been conditioned since birth to make that play. But even so, you actually took the harder road to do the right thing even if it meant you were forced to do wrong while you were on that road. It was selfless, it was brave and it was heroic. More so because, God willing, Valerie will never know you had to do the things you did to protect her. So she’s shielded from that too, knowing the way she is that she can’t help meant her son went through that for her. So you did it knowing you’d not even earn her gratitude. You did it knowing all you’d get is shit but she’d have peace of mind.”
Chace just stared at me, unmoving.
I kept ranting.
“If my father knew this, he’d admire you. If my mother knew this, she’d adore you. If the town knew this, they’d revere you more than they already do.”
“Right,” he said softly. “You think you got that figured out then what about Misty?”
“What about her?” I snapped.