Chapter 37 #2
I told myself we didn’t need to have this conversation because the answer doesn’t matter.
Because it doesn’t change anything between us.
Because when I said it was over, he left and neither of us tried to save it.
But now, the sturdy ground I’ve laid my arguments on feels shaky and off-balance, one point on the Richter scale from tipping over entirely. Now I need to know the truth.
“Why didn’t you fight for us?” I ask. “Why did you just give up?”
Recognition ripples through his eyes.
“You told me you were done,” he says. “You said it was over.”
“But what if I wanted you to fight for me?”
His jaw tightens, features sharpening under the glow of the lights. “What are you saying? That it was some kind of test? That I didn’t pass?”
“No,” I say, pushing out an exasperated breath. “But I think it says a lot about our marriage that you quit so easily. That you didn’t even try.”
“I thought I was giving you the space you wanted.”
Old hurt rears its head at the familiar words. “So you left?”
His mouth twists, his eyes narrowing. “You pushed me away, too, Ros.”
“I was grieving!”
“I didn’t know how to help you,” he says, his voice turning frayed and thin. “You wouldn’t get help. I told you to see a therapist, I—”
I grip the railing, frustration and hurt colliding inside me. “It wasn’t about the therapist, Liam. It was that I wanted you to talk with me. I wanted you to be there for me.”
I just wanted you, my brain screams.
He moves closer, his eyes dark and pleading. “I wanted to, but I didn’t know how to handle my own grief or how to be the person you needed me to be, and every time I tried to fix it, it only pushed you away further and made everything worse.”
“So it’s my fault you weren’t there for me after my mom died?”
He shakes his head. “No. I’m not saying that.”
“Then why wasn’t…” My lungs squeeze out a slow stream of air. “Why wasn’t I enough to make you stay and fight for me?” I finally force out.
“ ‘Enough’?” he repeats like he doesn’t know the meaning.
“You think you weren’t enough for me?” He runs a hand through his hair, gaze flashing with something wild and raw, and for a moment I think he’s angry, that he’s going to yell.
But when he speaks again his voice is fragile, so low I barely hear him.
“Do you know how fucking hard this week has been?” he asks.
“To touch you and taste you and just be near you again, knowing that I wasn’t going to get to keep you?
To know that when it was all over, we wouldn’t be going home together, to our house, our life, our bed?
” He winces, his hands flexing at his sides as though trying to keep himself from reaching out to me.
“This week has been agony for me, but I knew I would rather leave this ship in excruciating pain having accepted whatever you were willing to offer me than not get to have you at all.” He swallows down a shaky breath before he says, “You’re more than enough, Roslyn. You’re everything.”
His words rush through me like a tornado on a prairie, turning everything upside down, but it’s that one word, everything, that cracks me down the center, splitting me wide.
“Then why did you leave?” I whisper.
Heavy eyes look up to meet mine, and I don’t just see the pain in his eyes, I feel it. The raw hurt buried under every hard line and edge of his expression.
“My whole life I’ve never been able to fix anything.
I was told to ignore the problems at home and pretend they weren’t there.
I spent most of my childhood and teenage years feeling helpless.
” He drops his gaze, a deep breath rattling in his throat.
“Then I became a doctor and suddenly I could fix things. I could find answers. I could help people. And then I met you and I felt like I could give you what you needed, I could be safe and reliable and sturdy for you. I could give you the stability we both wanted.” He pins me down with a heavy look.
“But when your mum died, I didn’t know what to do.
I didn’t know how to deal with that kind of grief, and every time I tried to make things better, I only made everything worse.
“I hated watching you suffer. It was like I was that helpless fifteen-year-old boy watching my mum lose herself to grief and heartache all over again without a clue how to fix it or make it better. I was so afraid of losing you the same way I lost my mum. But I also hated myself for not knowing how to be the partner you needed, for not being able to take away your pain, for throwing myself into my work because that’s the only thing I’ve ever had any control over.
For letting my own shit keep me from being who you needed me to be.
” His voice breaks, the dampness in his eyes catching the lights overhead.
“I felt like the only place I could really be steady for you—where I wouldn’t mess things up—was in bed. But then we stopped having sex and I felt like maybe there wasn’t anything else I could give you.”
His words slide down my back like a block of ice.
“Then you said it was over, and there was this part of me that wondered if maybe you were right to walk away. If maybe you were better off without me. If I was just too fucked up to be what you needed.”
He steps closer and I see it all, the hurt and regret. All the anguish he’s kept locked inside himself for so long now bleeding across his face like spilled paint on a canvas.
“After I left, there wasn’t a day I didn’t spend thinking about you, about what would happen if I called, if I came after you, if I told you everything.
But I was in such a bad place. I was so fucking broken, Ros, and it didn’t feel fair to beg you for another chance when I couldn’t give you what you needed. ”
I feel my pulse in my ears.
“Then you asked me to come on this trip. And I knew it would fucking break me all over again to be so close to you and know it wasn’t real, that you didn’t want me back. But I could see that you needed my help, and it felt like one small thing I could do, one thing I could try to fix.
“But as soon as I saw you standing in the driveway in that fucking dress”—his hand flexes by his side—“I could hardly breathe, much less act normal around you, so I tried to keep my distance, if only to make the trip more tolerable. But then things got…” He gestures between us.
“We started sleeping together and I thought maybe we still had a chance. That I still had a chance,” he adds, giving me a meaningful look.
You always had a chance, my heart thunders. Always.
“But it also felt like a confirmation of everything I’d worried about, that sex was all I could offer you, all you wanted from me, and I knew it would destroy me to have you only to lose you again.
But I was also desperate enough to take whatever crumb you’d give me, for however long you’d give it to me because…
” His breathing slows, heavy eyes lifting to mine.
“Because you’re all I want, all I’ve ever wanted.
” He chokes back a sound. “And I know it’s not an excuse and it doesn’t fix everything that happened, but it’s the truth, and it kills me every fucking day, and probably will for the rest of my life. ”
His words send shock waves down my spine, straight into my splintered core, and suddenly my dress is too tight, my breath too short, my vision too blurred.
I can’t do this, I think. Not here. Not now. Not with my family a few feet away.
“Let’s not talk about this anymore,” I tell him. “We’re supposed to be acting like everything is fine.”
His shoulders slump, his eyes blinking away in defeat. “Right. Acting,” he repeats. “Because that’s all this is.”
“No, that’s—” I start to say just as Bella appears. We both jump apart like we’ve accidentally touched an electric fence.
Bella frowns. “Oh, sorry. Am I interrupting something?”
“No,” Liam and I say in unison.
Her brows stay furrowed, and I can tell she doesn’t quite believe us. “Okay, well, I was just coming to tell you it’s your song.”
Our what?
Then I hear it. “Dream a Little Dream of Me” is playing over the speakers.