Almost Just Friends (Wildstone #4)(62)

He laughed, and God, she loved making him laugh.

“I haven’t done it very much lately,” he said, making her realize she’d spoken out loud. “Not until I came here and met you.” He shook his head. “There’s not been a lot to laugh about.”

Her heart rolled over and exposed its tender underbelly. “You miss Rowan.”

“Yeah.”

She set her head on his shoulder. “I’m sorry.”

He pressed his jaw to her hair. “We were still pretty new to the sibling thing, since he was always so much younger than me.” He turned his head to hers. “You didn’t like him.”

She stilled. “Winnie tell you that?”

“No. Just a feeling.”

“Actually,” she said, “I liked him a lot. He was kind and sweet, and was good for your dad, kept him on the straight and narrow. He was Winnie’s BFF. After she left for college, he’d go down to see her sometimes. They didn’t tell me much because they knew I didn’t like how hard they partied. But he was a good guy.”

“But . . . ?”

She met his gaze and knew honesty was the only way to go here. “But . . . I felt he had a lot of growing up to do.”

“He wasn’t a good influence on Winnie.”

She gave a slow shake of her head. “No. But for what it’s worth, I think he was changing. I think he was growing up, and I hate that he’ll never have the chance to become whoever he was meant to be.” She swallowed hard at the look of grief on Cam’s face.

He turned to stare up at the sky.

She squeezed his hand, and he squeezed back, but other than that, he didn’t move, didn’t talk for a long moment. When he finally spoke, he did so without opening his eyes, voice low and gruff, filled with emotion.

“You know we didn’t spend a lot of time together, that he was too young for me to really connect with given that there was thousands of miles between us. But in the last few years, we got better at it. We called, texted, and there were a few visits here and there.” He paused. “I left my mom’s when I was sixteen, did I ever tell you that? I did the whole ‘angry at the world’ thing for a while.”

“Where did you go?” she asked, because she knew it hadn’t been here, to his dad’s.

“I stayed with friends,” he said. “I could’ve come here, my dad wanted me to, but I was still pissed off at him for abandoning my mom. It wasn’t until later that I realized it wasn’t like that, that he’d legitimately tried, but she was way worse when he came around. I think it was guilt over not being able to raise Rowan. She . . . she wasn’t well. She got a late-in-life diagnosis of being bipolar, and she preferred to self-medicate with alcohol rather than take her meds. She tried rehab a bunch of times, but it never took. Eventually, she went to live in a halfway house, and stayed there until she died.”

“You were already in the military.”

“Yes.”

Piper had spent a lot of years thinking no one really understood what she’d been up against when her parents had died. But now she knew Cam understood, that he got it in a way she wished he didn’t have to. “I can’t imagine how hard it was for you, growing up like that.”

He shrugged. “She did the best she could. Same with Rowan. And I was still way too hard on him.” He shook his head, eyes tortured. “And now he’s gone, and the last thing I said to him was in anger.”

Her throat tightened at the emotion in his voice. “I’m so sorry, Cam. What happened?”

He let out a long breath. “We fought about his future. It’s hard to forgive myself for that, that his last memory was of me being mad at him.”

“He wouldn’t want you to be holding on to that. You know he never held on to anything negative. That wasn’t his way.”

When he didn’t look at her, she gently turned his face to hers.

“I hear you,” he said. “But it’s hard.”

“I know.”

He met her gaze. “You too?”

“Oh, yeah.” She gave him a grim smile. “When my parents sent us home, I was furious. Even though they’d promised to follow us and arrive as soon as they could, I didn’t understand.” She drew a deep breath because it was always hard to think about, the memories of how awful she’d been. “I just saw it as they were dumping us because we were too much trouble. I told them they were terrible parents who were tired of lugging their children around, so they were sending us away to be selfish.” She let out a long, shaky breath. “They died before I got to talk to them again, to tell them I loved them. That I was sorry.”

“They knew,” he said firmly.

She gave him a small smile. “Because you want it to be true for me?”

“Because you’re an amazing person and they knew that, or they’d never have trusted you with Winnie and Gavin.”

She’d never looked at it that way, but it did soothe something deep inside her. They had trusted her. And now . . . now Gavin was in recovery and Winnie was pregnant at twenty. Yeah, she’d done a bang-up job.

“None of that’s on you,” he murmured, and squeezed her hand again.

Maybe not. But it was going to change her world, in a big way. Because the Mannings were a unit, like it or not.