He thought about everything they’d shared the night before. “She told me she loves me.”
Elizabeth put the knife down. “Just to clarify, the bad news is that a warm, smart, kind, incredibly lovely woman loves you?”
He eyed her, feeling like a jerk. “It’s not as simple as it sounds. I enjoy her company. I like being with her, that’s true. But—” He picked up one of the gingerbread Santas and stared down at it. “I never should have started this, but I didn’t expect it to get so serious so fast. And now I have to find a way to unravel it without hurting her badly.”
“Why would you want to unravel it?”
“Because it has no future.”
“Are you sure about that? You don’t feel the same way? You don’t love her?”
He waited a beat. “No.”
“Are you sure? Because watching you together I thought—” Elizabeth put the iced gingerbread back on the rack. “Ignore me.”
“You’re thinking that I love her too, but I don’t. Honestly? I think there’s something missing inside me—” He put the gingerbread down untouched. “I don’t feel deeply anymore. I taught myself to switch off and detach and now I can’t switch it back on again. And Harriet deserves more than that.”
“So you’re not making this decision for you, you’re making it for her? Why don’t you let her decide what she needs?”
“I don’t want to see her hurt.”
“I’ve known you since you were a little boy and you’ve always been the same. Always first there to save anything injured or damaged.” Elizabeth reached across the table and took his hand. “I knew when I gave you your first Superman costume that you were going to try and save the world.”
“Yeah, well even Superman struggled to save the world and have a relationship. Relationships are complicated.”
“Anything that involves people is complicated. That doesn’t mean we should walk away. Have you talked to her about it?”
“No.” And he realized that while Harriet was constantly forcing herself to face challenges head-on, his own approach was less impressive.
He’d walked out.
Elizabeth smiled. “It seems to me, an honest conversation would be a good place to start.”
“You’re right.” He stood up, gave her a hug and walked out of her kitchen.
No matter how hard it was for him to say, and how hard it was for Harriet to hear, he needed to be honest.
Challenge Ethan.
HARRIET WOKE FEELING EXHAUSTED. She’d lain awake for half the night, thinking about what she’d said, and finally fallen asleep as the first fingers of light had poked their way through the trees.
The bed next to her was empty and cold, indicating that Ethan was long gone. For a moment she wondered if he’d packed and left, but then she saw his things strewn around the shelf.
She flopped back against the pillow, staring at the trees.
Way to go, Harriet. How to drive a man out into a blizzard.
He seemed to think that what he did, who he was, wasn’t compatible with love and family life. He blamed himself. Felt responsible. She disagreed, but it wasn’t what she thought that mattered.
You couldn’t make someone love you. That wasn’t how it worked. And a relationship between two people whose feelings were unevenly matched could only ever end in disaster. Feelings became a fault line, which would crack under pressure.
All her life she’d wanted love. To suddenly find it and know that it wasn’t returned was the most exquisite agony.
Was this how her father had felt? Had he lived through every day knowing that his deeply felt emotions weren’t returned? How hard must that have been to deal with?
It wasn’t an excuse, but it was an explanation.
Harriet realized there could have been any number of reasons why her father hadn’t loved her. Maybe she reminded him too much of her mother, the woman he loved so deeply and who didn’t love him back. Maybe loving deeply had hurt him so badly that he’d been afraid to love again, even a child. She didn’t know his reasons but what she did know was that his reasons had nothing to do with her. She wasn’t responsible for the fact that his feelings for her weren’t what she wanted them to be. If she could have gone back in time and spoken to the child she’d been then, she would have told her to stop trying so hard to please other people. She would have told her that life was hard enough without twisting yourself into knots trying to be someone you weren’t, or trying to live up to some ridiculous standard that you weren’t part of making.