Persuasion by Martina Boone

never going to fit. He thinks that means you’re disappointed in him for not being more like you.”
    That was a worse betrayal than anything Lula had ever done. Lula might not even have known about the binding. Since Emmett had wanted the gift buried and forgotten, Barrie had to assume he had never explained it to Lula any more than he had to Pru. But also, Lula had been Lula. She’d never made any pretense of being up for a mother-of-the-year award.
    “You have to tell Eight. Warn him.” Pushing away from the tree, she walked to where Seven stood. “You should have warned me when I first came.”
    “Pru wasn’t sure you even had the gift, and she didn’t want us saying anything in case you didn’t. At least until you’d settled in.” Seven placed both hands on Barrie’s shoulders. “Honestly, I wasn’t sure how to tell you until I knew you better. But I do know Eight. His happiness obviously means a lot to you. Think about it. Wouldn’t you keep a secret to keep him happy?”
    Barrie shook her head. “Not this secret. It isn’t mine to keep. Or yours. And he’s going to do what he wants about going out to California, regardless of what I tell him.”
    “Is he?” Seven’s face was pinched with regret. Barrie tried to picture what she would have done in his shoes, but she couldn’t say. Seven’s good intentions didn’t change the fact that hiding something this important from Eight was wrong. All that did was set him up for an even bigger trauma later.
    Seven glanced toward the corner of the house to see if Eight and Pru were returning yet, but they weren’t. Digging into his pockets, he jiggled his keys or loose change—something that sounded like raw nerves jangling.
    “I love Eight,” he said simply. “Thanks to the Beaufort gift, that fact alone makes it painful for me to refuse him anything. On the other hand, I’m also his father, which means I have responsibilities beyond what the gift urges me to do. Eight thinks he knows what the compulsion to give people what they want feels like. He has no idea how much worsethat will become, and I won’t tell him and spoil his happiness. But that’s why you have to let him go. You have to want him not to stay, and you can’t tell him about the binding.”
    “How do I make myself want something that I don’t really want? I can’t,” Barrie said.
    “You will if you care about him at all.” Seven’s eyes softened into sympathy, but he averted his face almost immediately as if he realized how much she didn’t want his pity. Of course he realized. He knew .
    “With all that’s happened since you arrived,” Seven continued, “I’ve finally come to see that, to Eight, baseball is much more than a sport. It’s who he is. Don’t you see? These things that we Beauforts and Watsons refer to as ‘gifts’ are as much curses as anything the Colesworths have to bear. The ‘gifts’ keep us bound here so tight, we don’t even bother dreaming. You’ve already given up on wanting to go to art school. But you at least had the chance to consider what you wanted. Beaufort heirs have always stayed here and practiced law, so that was what I was going to do. I never even let myself think about other options when I was growing up. Dreams shape the kind of human beings we become. Not having a dream gave me a smaller future and made me a smaller person. It would be selfish for me not to want more than that for my son.”
    Until that moment, Seven had always been a little larger than life to Barrie. He’d always seemed so self-possessedand intimidating that she’d never imagined that he could look so . . . undone.
    “Eight will still have to abandon whatever life he has built for himself once I’m gone,” Seven said, “but at least he will come back to Beaufort Hall knowing that he has done his best to live the kind of life he wanted. That’s why you have to let him go.”
    “How am I supposed to do that?” Barrie asked in a strangled