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“I am,” he said. “Are you sure you don’t mind me driving your car?”
“Nope,” she said. “I know you’re probably comfortable in your truck, but for a longer drive, I thought it might be easier in my SUV navigating traffic.”
“It will be,” he said. “I love my truck and can get through anything with it, but I really should get another car to have at times.”
“Why?” she asked. “It’s kind of wasteful unless you don’t want too many miles on your truck. Plus it’s good advertising.”
“There is that,” he said. “But it’s not always practical. I guess I never did much to worry about it.”
“And now you’re going on holiday trips to spend with family.”
“I am,” he said, smiling at her. It didn’t seem as if he was bothered by that so that was good at least.
She turned to look at him when he pulled out of his driveway. “Did you talk to Blaze? What is he doing for the holiday?”
She knew that Knox hadn’t talked to his mother but was keeping in more contact with Blaze.
“He’s leaving the twenty-sixth to spend a few weeks with his father,” he said. “As much as he would have liked to go sooner, I think he felt like he couldn’t do that to our mother.”
“Has your mother ever asked you to come home for the holidays? Or in the past few years since you’ve been alone?”
“No,” he said.
That just broke her heart. How could a parent not do that? “You spent the last few years alone?”
He let out a sigh. “It’s just a day.”
“No,” she said. “It’s not.”
“When my father was alive, it was only the two of us. Both of his parents had passed. We never did much anyway.”
“What did you do?” she asked. “Do you have any childhood memories that are nice that you want to share? Or would you rather just end this conversation?”
“No,” he said. “We can talk about it. Not everything in my life was horrible. But I’ll be honest and say my father was disconnected. I thought about what you said and that maybe my father distanced himself when he suspected things and I just got caught up in the tide and left to float on my own.”
“That was wrong of them both,” she said.
“Nothing I can do about it. It makes me wonder if that is why my father was so accepting of my attitude for years toward him. I had so much resentment over everything. I was leaving my friends, however few they were. I was leaving you.”
“Come on,” she said. “Be serious.”
“I am being serious, Sage. I considered you one of my friends. I had a crush on you, but I still thought of you as a friend. You were a friendly face that was nice to me. I had to move to a new state. New school. Make friends and try to act like there wasn’t a shit storm in my house and I was ducking for cover at every opportunity.”
She’d never thought of any of that.
“You had no one to talk to?” she asked.
“Who?” he asked. “New friends don’t want to hear that drama. I kept most of it quiet. I never said a word about what my mother did. Just that my parents were separated. No one questioned anything. Lots of kids’ parents are divorced and have other kids with someone else.”
“Good point,” she said.
“I went to school, I kept to myself, and then I went home and stayed in my room. My mother had a newborn. She was living with Zach and they were trying to get into a routine. I mean they’d been together over a year, but no one knew. It’s not like they lived together or knew how they’d be. Blaze is a laid back guy but wasn’t an easy baby. No one paid attention to me.”
She felt her eyes fill with tears. “I’m so sorry that happened to you. How often did you see your father?”
“Not that much. We were too far away for weekend visits. I’d go there when I had a week off from school. We were in Wilmington, Delaware, which was about three and a half hours from New Haven where my father lived.”
“Then holidays were with him,” she said.
