“I just don’t understand. You had no problem having Clint over all the time, basically taking care of him. And I had half brothers out there...”

“Well, your father didn’t sleep with Clint’s mother.”

And that was right there. The heart of it. The worst, ugliest parts.

When there was love involved, it all got crazy. And it got toxic. And his mother, who had a heart big enough to spend her days making biscuits with Clint’s widow and his little girl, to treat them both like family, had turned a blind eye to other children who had been in need because she’d been scorned. She’d even been willing to push her son in a direction he didn’t want to go to satisfy that need for revenge.

“You know I didn’t want to go into the rodeo,” he said.

“But you ended up being a champion,” she said. “And look at all the money you made. Now you’re able to start up this ranch for troubled boys. And if you’re so worried about all of that then how can you regret it?”

There was the tough part. He was standing here, the man he’d been molded into by all these years, and he wasn’t sure what changing the past fifteen years would even look like.

“I guess I can’t,” he said. “But I can be as angry as I want to be about the method. And I am. Trust me on that.”

He turned and walked out of the living room, walking quickly past the kitchen without saying goodbye to Ellie or Amelia.

He felt... He felt like a damned fool. And like barbed wire was being twisted around his gut. His mom was the one he’d trusted in all of this. And he’d been so damned vulnerable at the point when all this had come to pass.

Fresh off his breakup, which had taken what he’d believed about himself and turned it on its head. He’d thought he was capable of loving a woman. That he was different than his parents, than his father. He’d thought he was stronger, more mature, more capable of a relationship than either of his parents.

And he’d found out how untrue that was.

How much you could lie to yourself. How much decay you could miss inside your own soul.

And he’d been in desperate need of a chance to prove himself.

And he had to wonder if really he, Caleb and Jacob had always just been pawns for Hank and Tammy to manipulate in their game. Their relationship, which mattered above all else, and somehow mattered more than right, wrong or their own children.

He pressed his hand to his chest and rubbed, and he knew that it was past time to meet with his siblings and have a discussion.

Because the steps they were taking next, from the ranch to the situation with his parents and with the half siblings they didn’t know they had, were going to have to include them.