CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
The mood changes instantly after Lisset’s revelation and we leave my parents’ house soon after, despite my family’s protestations. When I feel exposed, I either lash out or retreat. It’s not my most appealing character trait, but it’s a pattern I struggle to break. And I don’t want to hang around and endure everyone’s pitying looks.
Gideon puts up no argument when I ask him to take me home, sticking to his promise to leave whenever I want.
I’m quiet on the drive back. Lisset keeps up a constant flow of chatter, but I let Gideon field her questions. I rest my forehead against the glass and stare out the window. I can’t look at Gideon. Not when I feel so laid bare.
We pull up to my house and exit the car. Lisset retreats inside and leaves us standing there on the driveway, Gideon looking at me and me looking anywhere else but at him.
“Thank you for the lift.”
“Hey, come on, talk to me,” he urges.
Embarrassment sits heavy on my chest. “There’s nothing to talk about.”
“You might feel better talking it out, instead of keeping it all inside.”
I glance up at him, my stomach tensing at his concerned expression.
What is there to talk about? The woman in the shower is Katherine. Timid. Weak. Fragile. She might be tempted to spill her feelings to a man she’s attracted to and allow him to console her, but Katherine is a stranger to me. I’m not her anymore. I’m Kate, and she’s fought hard to be strong and independent. She doesn’t treat her driveway as a confessional or a near-virtual stranger as her therapist.
“Look, now’s not a great time,” I say stiffly. “We’ll connect sometime in the week.”
He regards me silently for a few seconds. “No, we won’t,” he says. “You’ll put up your walls again and keep me out. I’m not leaving like this. Let’s talk.”
A familiar ache springs up in my chest. The truth is no one wants to pull back the curtain on food styling. They prefer the mystery and intrigue. It’s the same with someone’s life. You don’t want to pull back the curtain and see the messy, ugly, day-to-day reality of someone’s existence. You want them attractive and flirty and fun. You don’t want to see them in sweatpants and no makeup, too tired to hit the town with you.
You don’t want to deal with them crying in the shower.
Oliver was like that. He wanted the stylized facade. Maybe Gideon’s different. Then again, maybe he’s not.
My throat is tight. “I don’t feel comfortable talking about this.”
“You’re not weak because you cry, Kate. You’re human.” I see a flash of what looks like pain in his eyes. “You think I don’t break down? I can’t watch a movie if any of the characters are dying of cancer. It brings back too many memories of my mom. I can’t listen to Queen or Abba or Cat Stevens, because they were my mom’s favorite artists.”
His still-raw grief touches me. “I wish I could have met your mom.”
“Yeah, me too. You would have liked her. And she definitely would have liked you.”
I feel the barriers I’ve meticulously erected around my heart start to crumble in the face of Gideon’s relentless tenderness and gentle coaxing. But it’s also time to inject some unvarnished honesty into his rose-colored veins. “Gideon, I’m a single mom running on empty. I work to put food on the table and then I come home and take care of Lisset. I try to visit my family on the weekends, and I have neither the time nor the inclination for friends.” I draw in another deep breath. “I don’t know if there’s anything left of me to carve out for you.”
He stares at me with calm, steady eyes. “You don’t have to carve anything out for me,” he tells me. “I’m not asking you to give up anything.”
“What are you asking for?” I whisper.
“I’m asking for a chance. I want you to let me in and get to know me. I want to get to know you.” He goes silent for a few seconds before his face takes on a look I can’t read. “And I want you to stop feeling like the only place you can cry is in the shower when you’re alone. You don’t have to put up a wall or a facade with me.”
A strange sensation stirs inside me. I’ve constructed such a labyrinth of walls around myself that most people, when they meet me, are too daunted by the maze to even attempt to navigate it. Except for Gideon. For some unfathomable reason, he’s not daunted. It’s as though he can see past the walls to the woman hiding in the center of the maze.
A sense of hope pushes through me, like a sapling pushing its way through the soil, desperate to reach warmth and light. Wanting to grow. Wanting to reach unimaginable heights.
“A chance?” I ask, when I finally trust myself to speak.
“A chance,” he confirms.
I bite my lip, wavering. “All right, Gideon Walker, you get your chance. But we’re taking it slow,” I warn him.
He offers me a rueful smile. “Any slower and we’ll be going backward.”
And even after everything that’s happened, he still has the capability to make me laugh.
[MESSAGES]
Tess: I’m sorry for saying you never cry.
Tess: It really was such a crappy thing to say.
Tess: But I’m glad you cry. I mean, I’m not glad in a sadistic way, just glad you have that release. In a non-sadistic way.
Tess: Let me point out though that Gideon has broad shoulders. Perfect for crying on.
Tess: Please say you forgive me.
Tess: Otherwise I’m going to keep texting you. I can do this all day. Literally.
Kate: I forgive you.
“I don’t want to read!” Lisset cries out, throwing her book down.
The spring day is warm enough so we’re sitting outside on my porch. It’s Gideon’s idea. He wants to encourage Lisset to read in her own surroundings and not only at his house.
It’s been two weeks since the family lunch. No one has made too big a deal of Lisset’s revelation. My family check in on me more often, which I tolerate, but they don’t walk on eggshells around me. Tess still inundates me with texts and tries her level best to annoy me. And Gideon continues to come round on Fridays, where we sit on the porch and sip our wine and talk. It no longer scares me how much I look forward to seeing him. This thing between us feels precious and delicate. It feels as though we’re building up the small moments in our lead-up to the big moment, our first real date.
I meet Gideon’s gaze. We’re both startled by Lisset’s outburst. She was doing so well with her reading. I thought we’d turned a corner and now this.
I scoot forward in my chair, preparing to address her, but Gideon touches my arm lightly.
Wait , he mouths.
Uno hasn’t taken his eyes off Lisset. They’re sitting together on the reading blanket on the porch, the discarded book in front of them.
Out of Lisset’s line of sight, Gideon makes a subtle gesture to Uno. The greyhound obediently tilts his head to one side, confusion etched in his brown eyes.
“Stop it,” Lisset tells him. “I’m not going to read.”
Gideon motions again and Uno places a paw on Lisset’s knee, as if to invite her to talk to him.
She’s shaking her head and I see tears forming in her eyes.
In the next instant, without any prompting from Gideon, Uno places his head in her lap, looking worried, instinct driving him to comfort her.
We can’t continue like this. Something terrible is eating away at my daughter.
I kneel next to her on the blanket and touch her shoulder. “Honey, please talk to us. What’s going on?”
Lisset’s face crumples. “I found Daddy’s letter in your drawer and I read what he wrote to you.” Tears pour down her cheeks. “He said horrible things about you and about me and how he never wanted to be a father.”
I feel the blood drain from my face.
Oh no . No , no , no .
That letter was filled with hateful statements. And Lisset had read all of them.
The little girl who could read above her grade level had read and understood and internalized all of those words, because she was clever like that. But she wasn’t emotionally mature enough to cope with their impact.
I look over at Gideon. I see in his face the same horrified realization that’s no doubt in mine.
This is why Lisset stopped reading. To protect herself. I can just imagine her logic. Reading that letter brought me pain, which means that reading equals pain; therefore, I’m going to stop reading. It probably made perfect sense in her sensitive eight-year-old brain.
My heart twists inside my chest. She sees words as weapons. And yes, they can be, but they can also be a balm to a hurting soul. Only she’s too young to understand that.
Even though the air around us is thick with a thousand things unsaid, Gideon senses this is a moment for Lisset and me. He pushes slowly to his feet, squeezes my shoulder and strokes Lisset’s hair. Then he quietly leaves, taking Uno with him.
I gather my wounded child into my arms, hugging her to me. She can’t stop crying. We sit like that for ages, rocking together.
After a while, when Lisset calms a little, it all tumbles out, how she was looking for my perfume, so she opened my bedside drawer and saw the letter there. She knew she shouldn’t read it, but Mrs. Bilson said she was the best reader in the class and Lisset wanted to read something grown-up and show everybody how grown up she was.
How devastating that she was forced to grow up too soon that day.
I press a kiss to her forehead and tell her I love her and everything will be okay.
Oliver has ruined so many things for his daughter, most notably her perception of a father figure. But now his vindictive words scrawled so carelessly on a piece of paper have tainted reading for her. Or is that my doing? After all, I was the one who kept the letter instead of destroying it.
Guilt chokes me.
All this time, Lisset has carried this horrible burden on her little shoulders, not coming to me, her mother, to help her relieve the weight of it. A weight she should never have had to carry in the first place.