Chapter 38
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
Gabriel
Penelope was always late but that didn’t mean I had to be, so I got to the restaurant exactly on time.
I reached the hostess’s podium and saw Penelope waving from a table by the window.
As much as I hated to admit it, every time I’d expected Penelope to stumble since she’d been back, she surprised me.
She’d not missed a single play session with Bethany.
She hadn’t tried to push me to tell Bethany that she was her mother.
She hadn’t been underhanded and told her anyway.
When I’d asked her to lunch, I hadn’t had to negotiate on day, time, or place. And she was on time.
“Please can I get some water?” I said to the hostess. “You want anything?” I asked Penelope.
“Water’s great.” She grinned at me. “Did you come from the office?”
I sat down and my phone buzzed in my pocket. “Excuse me.” I pulled out my mobile to see who had messaged me. Unsurprisingly, it was Mike. He seemed to get worse rather than better, constantly checking up on me—like I’d ever dropped the ball—and second-guessing my decisions.
“You need to make a call?” she asked. “It’s fine.”
I shook my head and picked up the menu. Mike would have to wait.
“I can’t believe you’re still doing it. Well,” she said, shrugging, “I never understood why you did the job in the first place. It’s not like you need the money.”
There was no need to dust off this dance that we’d done a thousand times before.
My job wasn’t any of her concern. “You know I think it’s important that Bethany has a good role model.
It’s good for her to see that everyone has to go out into the world and earn a living.
” Working, and working hard, wasn’t a bad thing.
“I don’t want to be just another trust fund kid. ”
“I know,” she said. “But I don’t think that’s the only reason you do it.” I didn’t ask her to elaborate. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know. “You’re never going to end up as your father. You have far too much character for that.”
It was the kind of thing she would have said to me when we were married.
At the heart of our relationship, there had always been mutual respect.
It was what had always puzzled me about Penelope’s leaving.
We didn’t argue. We bickered over little things but there had never been a fundamental disagreement.
Or so I’d always thought. Her departure had come out of the blue. I’d been completely blindsided.
“Going to work keeps me honest.”
She paused and looked at me. “Really? Going to work and doing something you hate keeps you honest? Why not choose something you love?”
I wasn’t interested in a come-to-Jesus moment for myself. I wanted to hear about hers. “So, Penelope, why are you back?” I asked. “Why now?”
“I suppose I figured out what was important.”
“And that took three years?”
“There were reasons I left. And there were reasons why I didn’t come back. They weren’t necessarily the same. I don’t know how to explain it to you.”
“Try,” I said. I wanted to hear this. I deserved to hear this. “All I’ve gotten so far is some messed-up analogy about monkey bars.”
She smiled and shifted her fringe out of her eyes. The fringe was new. It suited her.
“I always loved Bethany, but over that first year of her life, it felt like the walls were closing in. It felt like my life wasn’t my own and that my choices had been taken away from me.
” She looked sad but she didn’t look beaten or tired, and it occurred to me that before she’d left, that was how she’d looked—as if the color had drained from her face and someone had switched her into slow motion.
The woman who sat before me was much more like the woman I’d married compared to the one who’d left.
“All I could see was a future being an unpaid servant to this squirming human, and I knew you wanted more than one child,” she said. “I felt as if my entire future was laid out for me. I didn’t like it.”
I kept my expression neutral. I wasn’t sure if Penelope was telling me she’d been depressed, and if that’s what she was saying, I didn’t want to be insensitive. “You didn’t say anything at the time.”
“I don’t think I could have articulated it at the time. I just had this sense of panic, needing to run, needing to escape. I didn’t see that I wasn’t coping. I just felt this urge to leave. It didn’t help that I was clearly terrible at caring for Bethany.”
I frowned. “What do you mean?”
“I was so impatient with her. Remember when I screamed at her for crying? Like that was going to help.” She shook her head while she worried the edge of the menu with her nail.
“When you were around, you were so patient with her, so calming. You only had to pick her up and she settled. It emphasized the way I didn’t feel any of those things.
I was the opposite of calm. The opposite of patient.
I just felt like a failure. Like she’d be better off with you and without me.
I could get out of the way and let the two of you be. ”
As much as I’d like Penelope to have turned into a monster, she was still the same woman I’d married. The woman who set her standards way too high and beat herself up far too much when she didn’t meet them. “I should have paid more attention. I had no idea you felt any of this.”
She reached over and grabbed my hand. “This is not your fault,” she said. “We were trying to navigate not killing a tiny human. That is quite the distraction.”
I smiled, remembering how we used to hover over her cot to check she was breathing, how we baby-proofed our entire house before Penelope had given birth, even though Bethany wouldn’t crawl for months.
We’d been so cautious and careful about everything.
Everything except our own relationship. That had been left to wither and die.
“After I left, over the following few months, I sort of emerged from a fog only to be enveloped in shame and guilt for leaving,” she continued.
“I wanted to come back a thousand times. But what would I say? How would I explain myself?” she said.
“I’d left my child. It’s the ultimate crime for a mother.
” She pulled her hand from mine and took a sip of the water that had appeared on our table without our noticing.
I waited as she swallowed and took a deep breath, trying to push away the obvious upset.
“I loved you both, yet I abandoned you.” She shook her head.
“I have to live with myself for doing that.”
She glanced down at the menu, clearly not trying to decide on her order.
“Every time I thought about it, I ran further away in the hope that my shame would be left behind, but of course it followed me around and just got bigger. I figured out that the only way it wouldn’t just continue to grow and eventually eat me alive, was to turn around and face what I’d done. ”
“You’re back to face the shame of leaving?” I asked. Was she asking me for absolution? She couldn’t know me very well if she was.
She shook her head. “No, I had a lot of therapy to handle the shame. I’m back because I don’t want to compound the mistakes I’ve made by staying away.
I did a terrible thing to you both, but I don’t want that to be the end.
I don’t want to walk away and never return.
I want to move forward. Be Bethany’s mother.
And map out a new relationship with you. ”
I shook my head. Autumn would want me to agree and that would be that. But she didn’t understand the scar Penelope’s leaving had created.
She put up her hand to stop me from speaking. “Before you say anything, I know we can’t go backward. That’s not what I’m asking. Whatever happens in the future—whatever relationship we manage to salvage—I understand that it won’t be what we had.”
Whatever we’d had hadn’t been enough. It hadn’t stopped our family from falling apart.
“I know I’m asking a lot. And I understand it’s difficult for you to trust me after what I did. But I’m patient.”
It would have been far easier if Penelope had tried to excuse what she’d done, if she’d demanded that I let her back into Bethany’s life or if she’d lacked remorse.
But the way she’d explained things, it painted the situation in an entirely different light.
The anger and bitterness I had toward Penelope seeped away until I was left with nothing but sadness. For her. For Bethany. And for me.
I nodded. “Thank you for telling me this. I’m sorry . . . sorry for not noticing at the time. For not coming after you. And for hating you for all these years.”
She smiled at my confession. “I hated me too,” she said, tears forming in her eyes. “And some of that feeling still lingers.”
I drew in a breath and pushed back my shoulders. Penelope wasn’t a monster, and I wasn’t about to keep her in a cage, protecting Bethany from someone who cared for her. There was no going back. We could only move forward. “We should tell Bethany that you’re her mother.”
A guttural sob broke from Penelope’s throat and she nodded. “Thank you,” she whispered.
It was the last thing I’d expected to come out of this lunch.
I’d expected to be going through the motions so I could tell myself I’d done what Autumn had asked.
Autumn couldn’t have known Penelope’s reasons for leaving and staying away, but she knew enough to understand that I should hear Penelope out. She was the wisest woman I knew.
“You should come to dinner later in the week,” I said. “We can tell her together.”
“You’re a good man, Gabriel.”
“I’m going to ask you for something in return.”
“Anything,” she asked, her eyes brightening.
“Don’t take her from me, Penelope. I can’t give her up.” My jaw tightened and my fists clenched like I was ready to fight anyone who would even think about taking my daughter from me.
“Never,” she replied, shaking her head. “I promise.”
I reached across the table and put my hand over hers and my chest loosened at the softness of her familiar skin.
We had to find a way forward. For Bethany and for ourselves.
We had to move on from the hatred and anger, the shame and guilt.
Contrary to everything I’d taught myself to believe, we all deserved a second chance.