The tables were full, except the one they were seated at, with what she assumed were locals. People in work clothes and flannels, mostly eating soup. Which stood to reason, as it was a soup sort of day. She also took that as her lead when placing her order. The chicken and dumpling soup was served with ample rolls, and she gave thanks that she was able to eat and enjoy the flavor of the food. And that nothing seemed off. She had been feeling much better really since she arrived here.
“Have you been to the doctor yet?” Clara asked.
She shook her head, tearing her roll in half and dipping it in the soup. “I just was waiting. Really, I’ve been waiting for everything. Except...”
“Except you did decide to marry him.”
“Yes.” She made a study of her soup. “But what’s the other option?”
“There are many other options, Violet,” Clara said. “Moving back home. Moving somewhere else. Moving into the forest and beginning a life as a raccoon.”
“I just mean... I don’t marry him, and we live in separate towns and have to work out a custody arrangement? I don’t marry him, and something goes wrong with the pregnancy and I go back to pretending that I never met him?”
“Right. Okay. So basically, you can’t see a way around having your life be fundamentally changed by knowing him.”
“I don’t think I want to,” Violet said. “Does that make me a cliché? Am I a cliché virgin?”
“Yes,” Clara said. “But hey. Me, too. I fell for Alex so hard, so fast. Being with him... It changed me. It reordered my priorities. It made me realize how lonely I was.”
“That’s it exactly,” Violet said. “It made me realize that I was lonely. That I was holding myself back from things I actually did want. Just protecting myself and not fully realizing it. I’ve been sorting through that. And...” It hit her then that part of the reason this entire thing with his revelation about Breanna affected her was that it made her want to protect herself again. Made her want to take a step back from the initial decision she’d made. To push forward. To go all in. He was in love with someone else. And that was different than his feeling emotionally unavailable.
He had given his emotions to someone else.
“Do you love him?” Clara asked.
It was a question she didn’t want to answer. Why would shewantto answer it now? Why would she want to answer it now that she knew he loved someone else? And how small and obnoxious was it to be irritated that he loved someone who had died? It wasn’t the same kind of love. Because it wasn’t active.
“You don’t have to answer that,” Clara said, taking a bite of her plain hamburger. “I’m sorry. I am prying. And I didn’t come here to pry. I didn’t come here to make you regret having a friend.”
“I don’t regret our friendship,” Violet said. She sighed heavily. “Actually, what I’m realizing is that I’m not as normal as I thought I was. It’s easy for me to look at Wolf and see how damaged he is. By the different things that he’s been through. And to think that maybe I’m the person that needs to heal him. But I’m just kind of...turning over all the ways that I need to figure out how to heal myself.”
“Well, the unfortunate thing is I think it’s pretty hard to heal yourself,” Clara said, wrinkling her nose. “I think it usually involves other people.”
“That sounds messy,” Violet said.
“In my experience life is. Relationships are. I know we do our best to kind of compartmentalize the fact that you are related to my husband, and I never really want to creep you out, but also I’m your friend. And I’m not sure that we’ve really gone into just how messy things were with Alex and me in the beginning. I’m younger than him. I’m his friend—not just his friend, his military brother in arms’s younger sister. The guilt that he felt over all of that... It was pretty intense. And the thing with us... It started as attraction. But I think it wasn’t that simple. It never was. We wanted it to be. We wanted to believe that we could sleep together and not get emotionally involved. But I don’t think we ever could. I think that from the beginning the emotion was there. And that’s what fueled the sex, and I don’t know any other way to explain that. Except we had a connection that was real and deep and pretty quick. And all of our stuff got sorted out...messy. And often naked.”
“Well, thanks for that,” Violet said.
She tried to pretend she was horrified, but instead, she was just thinking. About the fact that she and Wolf were pretty good at the naked part. But there was a lot of clothed interaction that they seemed to struggle with.
“Was Alex a human wall?” Violet asked.
“He was pretty messed up. Yeah. Kind of like a wall. I thought of him as a piece of iron sometimes. He was hard, and he was especially hard when he was running away from forever. Because it became clear pretty quickly that things were going to be forever between us, and he was trying to figure out a way to make it...not that.”
“Well, Wolf and I have already decided to get married.”
“That’s its own unique challenge, I would think. He’s already got you. So what incentive does he have to change anything?”
That was a sobering question. “I don’t know,” Violet said.
She didn’t know, but she also didn’t want to hold marriage or uncertainty over his head. But it was... It was a very good point.
They paid and left the diner, then walked over to get ice cream, in spite of the chill. The ground was damp, covered in pine needles, and Violet kicked them to the side as she took a bite of her strawberry cheesecake ice cream cone.
“Tiny though it is,” Clara said, as they walked next to the gigantic pine trees, in front of the modest buildings, “this is a pretty adorable town. I suspect you could be pretty happy here.”
“Definitely,” Violet said. “Possibly.”