Chapter 36 Dinner For Shmucks #3
“I most certainly did not tear her to shreds. All I did was point out how wrong it is what you two are doing behind your sister’s back and if that’s out of line, then I simply don’t know what to say.” She stuck her nose as high up as her arrogance.
“How did you know?” I found myself asking.
My heart was beating so fast that my breath was shaking like I’d run five miles, and I’m sure to Stella it sounded like I was scared of her, but I wasn’t.
Actually, for the first time all day, I didn’t feel scared.
I didn’t feel like I was on the verge of combusting with panic or of a heartache so devitalizing it felt like my heart might literally just stop trying.
For the first time, I felt… tired. I felt tired of the drama and the injustice that this woman had treated me with. She didn’t know me past a woman who loved her son, and I wanted to know why my loving him offended her so goddamn much.
“You told me you knew about us the day you came to the bar because Ethan told you, but he didn’t. So… how?”
Perhaps Stella sensed the change in my mood, or maybe she’d just exhausted herself on her own hatred of me, but the fight in her eyes simmered. Her chest caved in as she sighed, casting her stare off to the side of the room as a peculiar reminiscing stretched across her aging eyes.
“The day Ethan told me about the lake. That’s when I knew.”
The lake?
“You probably don’t even remember this but when your father and I used to take you and your sister there, you would daydream out loud in the car ride there and back about how one day, you’d take your own family to the lake.
You said how you couldn’t wait to show your favorite spot in the world to the love of your life.
You’ve always been a romantic, darling.”
She hadn’t said it yet, but I could feel where the weight of this conversation was going. I could feel it in the air as it shifted around me like the wind, twirling the pieces of my broken heart around like they were nothing but fallen, dead leaves.
“I’d never taken anyone to that spot before,” Ethan said, piecing the pieces together himself. Then, his eyes dropped to mine and the howling wind came to a stop, shreds of my heart scattering around my feet.
“And then there was you.”
Me. A girl from New York who grew up creating ballets to Disney movie soundtracks and broke her ankle at age eight.
A girl who hated peas and cried at sad dog commercials.
A girl who ran away from everything that hurt her, holding the broken pieces of her heart in her hands when she arrived in town.
And then there was Ethan Black. He saw me— really saw me—and he took those pieces and crafted a mural out of them.
His compassion blended the colors, his inability to recognize boundaries molded the shape of it back together while his tender, romantic soul was meant to put the finishing touches in place.
Unfortunately, my heart would be his great, unfinished masterpiece.
“If that’s true…” The unfinished lines of my heart left open cuts for my sadness to bleed through. “Why wouldn’t you want him to be happy if it just meant being with me?”
Lines in Stella’s forehead creased deeper, and a tiny hope swelled inside as I read the consideration on her face.
She had to see it now, right? She had to see the suffering, the heartbreak, the desperate love—all of it—between me and her son.
She didn’t have to understand it, but she had to see it.
“I’m not a mean woman, Alice.” Her heel clicked against the floor as she came closer. “I’m actually quite nice as you would have seen had we met under any different circumstances, but as a mother I have to want what’s best for my son.”
All consideration in the lines of her face dropped and disappeared, leaving only fixed resentment behind.
“And that’s not you.”
“ Mom .”
I didn’t mean for it to, but the next word out of my mouth sounded like a cry.
“ Why ?”
Stella let a breath go that seemed somewhat sad, but her next words didn’t reflect that assumption whatsoever.
“Your sister is a successful, rising lawyer. You’re a woman with a career that will be over once your body breaks from the stress of the job, and then all you’ll be left with is bartending. That’s not a life I want for my son.”
Her words were the kick to the stomach I didn’t need. I wanted to hunch over, to cry into myself and wish those words away that I already knew were true. To hear them from someone else’s mouth was an entirely new, gut-punching experience.
Next to me, Ethan shifted, crossing his arms over his wide chest.
“Do you think Dad would have cared if you weren’t well-off when you two met?” Ethan started, his voice low. “Do you think he wouldn’t have fallen in love with you based on something so shallow?”
Stella saw where Ethan was going with this and only dug her heels in deeper. “That’s entirely different because I was well-off, and also wasn’t engaged to be married to someone else.”
At that, I flinched. Touche .
“I’m not talking about that, Mom. I’m talking about love and passion and support over stability and finances and which one you think Dad cared about more when you two got together, because I’d bet my life it’s not the second option.”
I’d almost forgotten how much of a fighter Ethan was amidst all of our recent losses, but this was him.
This was Ethan. Fighting and fighting for an end result that we both knew was pointless, but it mattered to him nonetheless.
It mattered to him that his mom saw our love not as something to be judged, but as something to be revered, even if it couldn’t go past today.
“I’m a romantic at heart because Dad was too. I got it from him, from watching him fawn over you, saw the way he looked at you while you would go on one of your unstoppable rants, saw how he took care of you.”
The mist was back in Stella’s eyes, her face cracking one by one to reveal the heartbroken woman she was underneath, jaded by too much grief not to suffocate under.
“If Dad were here now, don’t you think he’d see how I look at Alice…
” Long fingers curled around my own, stuttering my heart as they folded through mine.
My head tilted to lock eyes with Ethan, who was already gazing down at me with that look of love he spoke about.
The gentlest of smiles smoothed over his lips as he held my hand like he held my heart, sweetly and unapologetically.
“How she looks at me,” he murmured, fluttering my heart off its handle to bounce off of the walls of my ribcage until I literally couldn’t take the affection in his eyes any longer. I dropped my forehead against his arm, hiding my face there.
His hand squeezed around mine, and my heart felt it too. I couldn’t believe we were so close, so openly affectionate in front of another person, but I needed it. God, I needed him. My nose against his shirt, I breathed down all of him until my lungs were overflowing with fresh, burnt soap and love.
“He’d be happy for me knowing that I found what you and he had, I think. Don’t you think he’d want me to be happy?”
“I want you to be happy, too,” she whispered, eyes big and wet with unshed tears.
“Then you’ll stop. You’ll stop trying to make me marry someone I don’t love and you’ll stop going out of your way to hurt Alice. She would never stoop to that level, no matter how awful you were to her, because she knows it would hurt me. Every time you insult Alice—”
“—I hurt you,” Stella finished.
For the first time in several minutes, Stella looked to me. She blinked, shock coating her eyes over. Chances were that I’d never see Stella again after this tense moment, but I loved him even more for his protection.
“If everything you said about the lake was true, then that should be all that matters to you.” Hot breath tickled the top of my hair, telling me that Ethan was peering down at me, lips close to kissing my forehead. “No matter how this ends, it’s all that matters to me.”
And he knew it would end, even if his words left room for hope. He found me, he loved me, and he would lose me, and we both knew it.