Total pages in book: 69
Estimated words: 69775 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 349(@200wpm)___ 279(@250wpm)___ 233(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 69775 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 349(@200wpm)___ 279(@250wpm)___ 233(@300wpm)
*************FULL BOOK START HERE*************
Prologue
To anyone that I fell out with last year, fuck you this year as well.
—Nettie’s secret thoughts
Nettie
“I’m pregnant.”
Boone, my sweet Boone, looked at me like he was seeing me for the first time.
“Um, what?”
We were in high school. This should’ve never happened.
But when it came to Boone Daniel Windsor, I had zero control.
I never had, and I never would.
“I don’t…” I trailed off as Boone’s mother came into the room, eyes ablaze.
They were always ablaze.
“Bartholomew.” Gail Windsor, the woman of the house and the keeper of all the money, walked into Boone’s room like it was her right to do so.
And maybe it was.
This was her house, after all.
Well, hers and her husband’s.
Her husband made all the money.
Her husband, might I add, who wasn’t Boone’s father.
Boone was an oopsy baby with the pool boy.
Literally, the pool boy.
Gail got pregnant by the pool boy and Sawyer, Boone’s stepfather, had lost his shit. Gail, however, was all ‘if you kick me out I’m going to take half your fortune with me’ so he kept her.
He also, joy to the world, decided that Boone wasn’t to blame for his mother’s transgressions.
He embraced Boone as a son and took him under his wing.
That was the only thing that saved Boone’s personality from being just like his mother’s.
Though, Boone didn’t see his mother as being the wild bitch of the west.
He saw her as his precious mother that would never hurt him in any way.
He was wrong. Gail Windsor was a fuckin’ nut case that liked to run his life like a drill sergeant. She scheduled our dates—seriously, she scheduled our dates to work in with her schedule. She chose what he wore. She chose which school sports he played. And even worse, she had chosen what he would do with his life after graduation.
She’d decided that he would be a doctor, and as an act of rebellion that was really quite rare for Boone, he’d decided to go into veterinary medicine and not human medicine.
It was the best blowup I’d ever witnessed, and Gail blamed it all on me.
If she only knew just how different his life path would be had he gotten to choose it himself. If I’d actually had a role in helping him figure out what he wanted to do with his life.
In reality, Boone wanted to be a park ranger. He wanted to spend his life outdoors, soaking in what he loved. Instead, he was going to school eight hours away, to do a job that he wasn’t all that interested in, to make his mother happy.
And now we were having a baby and I had to figure out what the hell I was going to do.
My parents were not going to be happy about the news.
In fact, between Gail Windsor and my parents, Minnie and Barton Wheeler—the pastor and the pastor’s wife of Sawtooth Pentecostal Temple, this was about to become one of the worst times of my life.
My parents were awful. My dad more so than my mother. But my mother did whatever my father wanted, so if he told her to fuck us up, she would. Because she lived to please her man, and her children were subpar to her husband, and always would be.
“Yes, Mother?” Boone asked, looking ghostly white.
“What’s wrong?” Gail asked. “You look pale.”
He would be.
I’d just told him he was going to be a father at seventeen.
“Nothing,” Boone lied. “I’m just hungry.”
“You should’ve eaten your afternoon snack like I instructed instead of coming straight up here with Antoinette.”
Gag.
I hated my real name.
I much, much preferred being called Nettie, and Gail knew it. She took a sick sort of pleasure in calling me by my given name, and always enjoyed watching my eyelid twitching.
“It was important.” I shrugged.
“Well, what was so important that you would call him straight up to the informal living room instead of allowing him to eat after a tough polo practice?”
I kept my mouth shut.
I wasn’t ready for her to know what news I’d just shared.
I wanted to process it with Boone first.
“Just prom plans,” Boone lied.
He saw and read the tension that I had with his mother easily. I’d shared with him multiple times, and had long drawn-out discussions others, about how his mother was unbearable and controlling.
He saw it, of course.
It was hard not to.
But for some reason since she was his mother, he had a hard time reconciling the fact that she was a bad person.
“Oh, you’re going to that?” she asked. “I thought we’d decided that you were to join me at the ball for the business district that night?”
My eyelid twitched.