Chapter Eighteen #2
Mara shook her head. All her foundations had been crumbling lately, and she’d resisted it. Gripped those last pieces fiercely. And for what?
She did see him, and what was more, he saw her. He’d seen through her refusal of his love as fear. She hadn’t wanted to admit it, but seeing his mother so easily dismiss a man as strong and good and wonderful as Agustin…
She had made a terrible mistake. A field of terrible mistakes.
But she could do the impossible. She always had. So she would fix this.
“I… I have to go. Can you tell Claudia I won’t be back for…for as long as it takes?”
Senora Delgado looked her up and down. “I’m not a messenger, Mara.”
But Mara didn’t pay her any mind. She was already flying to the door. No doubt he’d gone to the office. She honestly couldn’t imagine he’d go anywhere else.
And I know you, I do. I see you. There was something about seeing the warped family dynamics of the Delgados that opened her eyes to the fight-or-flight mentality she’d had since her father left.
There was a difference now when it came to trusting someone. She was not a child. She was an adult. She did not see Agustin as she wanted him to be—there were a handful of things she would certainly change about him if she could—but as he was. Flaws and amazingness in one complicated package.
She had never viewed her father as anything other than the hero who’d abandoned her. But he was his own complicated person, wherever he was out there. Probably not good. Probably not worthy of the hero worship she’d held onto for so long.
Life wasn’t black and white. It wasn’t simple.
And in the end, this wasn’t about her father or abandonment. It was about fear. Fear of being weak. Fear of not standing up under the weight of it all.
Was that the legacy she wanted to leave for her children? To live in fear, in misunderstanding? Because that was what she was choosing, just like the Delgados. Keep each other at arm’s length so the confusions, the difficulties, didn’t press upon you.
But it kept love away. It kept life away. Maybe she would have spent the rest of her life doing that to herself, but she could not do it to her children. And she would not do it to Agustin.
She made it to the front door and flung it open, her plan to get to the office only half formed, but then it didn’t matter.
Agustin stood on the porch, arm outstretched like he’d been about to open the door himself. He eyed her skeptically, but when she launched herself at him, he caught her.
For a moment, she just clung to him, and he held on. This… This. His steadiness and steadfastness. He could be part of her foundation and she knew, she knew, he would not crumble. He would not allow it.
“This is quite the change of heart,” he said into her hair.
“No, not a change of heart. Never a change of heart.” She pressed her forehead into his chest and tried to breathe. She thought she’d have time to figure out what she was trying to work through, but he was here. He was here. He was always right here. “I am sorry.”
He pulled her back but only a little, only enough to look down at her. “For what, exactly?” His expression was blank, but his grip was tight on her shoulders, belying a deeper reaction.
“For letting fear drive me these past few weeks. I have never felt so…irrational, not since my father left, and I think that made it worse. It felt like then, that all this control I’d built was suddenly…gone.”
“I am not leaving, mi esposa. No matter what you might prefer. I simply needed a break.”
“I know. I know. I was coming down to the office to find you. That’s where you went, isn’t it? To work.”
He looked at her for a long, silent moment. She worried it might mean that she was wrong, but then he nodded incrementally.
“I do see you,” she went on. “Better than anyone. Maybe it isn’t perfect, but it is seeing you.”
He inhaled carefully. “Yes, I think you do.”
“Perhaps they did not understand you, and I have done a better job, but to fully understand, you have to communicate. Perhaps you tried with them, but you have not tried with me.”
“Except to tell you that I love you.”
She blinked. Well. “Yes, all right. Yes. But… I did not know why you kept them separate. I did not know why you should want to marry me instead of the countess. But now that I know, now that I have…contended with my own fear, I think things can be different.”
“Can they?”
His expression was still unreadable, but she knew him. She knew him. He would set her aside if he did not want to hear it. “I love you, Agustin. In fact, I am quite certain I fell in love with you long before you fell in love with me.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Is it to be a contest?”
This made her laugh, and when she did, a few tears spilled over. She didn’t wipe them away, because she didn’t want to let him go. She wanted…everything.
She would reach out and grab everything and hold it close. Whatever she lost, whatever changed and left, whatever stayed or didn’t, she would hold the things that mattered close.
It was what her father hadn’t done. What Felipe and Adelina hadn’t done. And what Agustin was struggling to do, if not always perfectly.
“I am not comparing you to my father. It is not that. It is how I felt in the aftermath of his leaving, and I was feeling it again. Lost. Out of control. I have built my adult life on being needed, and loving is not needing. It is something else entirely. And I panicked. You see, he left, and it devastated everything. It introduced every struggle in my life. And I blamed myself, because…because he had doted on me. I was so obviously the favorite. If he left, it had to be my fault, did it not?”
“Mara…”
“Nothing you can say would change that it was how it felt. It was something I had to learn myself as I grew up. As I experienced the way life can twist into complication. Felipe did not leave Julia because of that sweet baby. Neither did Adelina for that matter. The choices adults make…they are not for children to carry on their backs. I would not want Julia or this baby to carry the weight of me refusing to love you because I was afraid it would someday not be what it is today.”
She inhaled, cracked open and…felt lighter. Steadier. Made new by these realizations and revelations and Agustin holding her as she let them out.
“I just wanted everyone to need me. I want you to need me, so that I am not so easy to toss aside.”
“I do need you. But you are going to have to need me too. It cannot be a one-sided need, Mara. Even you will find fault with that eventually.”
It was a terrifying prospect. Moreso even than love, because it meant trusting someone, leaning on someone. It meant tearing up all the foundations she’d put in place in the aftermath of her father’s abandonment.
“What if I do not know how to need anymore?”
He put a hand to her cheek. “I will teach you how. Let me. Trust me. Have I ever given you reason not to?”
No, he had never given her a reason not to trust him. He had always been exactly the man he was—even when he was stubborn and too sure his own way was the best way. She had never lost her faith in who he was.
“All right.”
He cupped her other cheek with his other hand and lowered his forehead to hers. “All right what?”
“We will…we will give this a try. As two people who love each other.”
“As husband and wife, who love each other, and our children.”
It was everything she wanted. And it seemed too good to be true. But what was better? Holding oneself back from what was too good to be true? Or holding onto it for all it was worth?