“No.” But that right there was the problem. Her head didn’t love him. Her heart wasn’t yet as fully convinced.
Marsh wasn’t, either. “I’m not sure I believe you.”
Hannah’s eyes stung. “I can’t seem to turn off my feelings for him the way he turned off his for me. I loved him for fifteen years. Then he turned into someone I don’t know. Maybe I should have seen the changes, but I didn’t. Whatever went wrong, I’m at least partly to blame.”
Marsh gave some thought to her words before carefully picking his own to reply. “He likely never stopped loving you. It appears to me as if he’s the type of man who gets restless, is all. Some women don’t mind that. You do.” He patted her hand. “He’s not for you, darlin’. That doesn’t mean you have to turn off your feelings. I’m sure you had plenty of good times together, despite how things ended. You got used to having him around. Like a favorite old pair of boots. But understand that if you do go back to him, the relationship ain’t ever going to be equal. He sounds like a taker. You’d always be giving more.”
“I won’t go back to him,” Hannah said. Her head wasn’t stupid. Her heart was the dumb one. It couldn’t seem to let go.
“Then what’s the problem?”
“I’m sad and I’m angry that we lost what we might have had. He threw it away. I don’t want to have any feelings for him anymore. I want to give them all to… someone else.”
“I’m so old, sometimes I forget how tragic it is to be young.” Humor smoothed the lines on Marsh’s cheeks and crinkled his eyes. “No one’s ever going to get one hundred percent of your feelings, Hannah. That’s why God gifted you plenty enough to spread around.”
It didn’t feel like much of a gift. Mostly, her feelings swirled around inside her like twigs in an eddy, catching and snarling on every rock that they bumped into until they were all tangled together in one giant clump. “That’s easy for you to say. You were married to the same woman for seventy-three years.”
“Sure was. But she wasn’t always married to me. Her first husband passed away after less than a year and she didn’t think she’d ever love anyone again. I had to work hard to get her to notice me, let alone agree to marry me. And I never once asked her to turn off her feelings for him. We had a different relationship between us, that’s all.”
“How did you get through it?”
“It was harder for her. She went through the anger and guilt, all the things you likely feel, except for different reasons. She’d lost someone important, which made her angry, and he’d never get a crack at a second chance the way she did, and that made her feel guilty and angry. All I did was hold her hand while she muddled it out. In the end she made room for me, too.”
Hannah smoothed the rumpled cotton blanket over his knee, more to settle her thoughts than because the blanket needed straightening. Outside the window, the rain had quit throwing its temper tantrum and the sun beamed with relief. A lot of the weight she’d been feeling—weight she couldn’t explain—shifted so it didn’t seem as much of a burden.
“Why wouldn’t she make room? You’re pretty easy to love,” she said.
Marsh grinned. “So is Dr. Dallie.”
“He is,” she confessed.
And she wished with all her heart that she’d loved him first. Then it wouldn’t be in this mess.