Chapter 26 #2
Now, with years behind her and the sharp edges of that night dulled by time, she could see how tangled it all really was.
How they’d both let pride and fear turn them into strangers.
She hadn’t told his parents not to share things with him about the cottage transformation, but whatever they had said hadn’t inspired him to come see it.
She also hadn’t reached out and offered him the chance to take a look.
Now she wasn’t sure what that meant for them—if it meant anything at all—but she knew she didn’t want to carry that burden anymore.
She didn’t want to pretend that he had been the only one who’d let it slip through their fingers.
She fumbled to pull back the chair and sat down heavily then, realizing Ethan had done the same.
“So.” Ethan laid his hands on his knees, fingers splayed, inhaling and exhaling deeply as he appeared to try to get his bearings. “So, my boss, Mr. Fordham, Henry Fordham, is your grandfather? Your mother’s dad?”
“Yes,” both Julia and Hank responded simultaneously, and then exchanged a glance.
“I mean…” Julia continued hesitantly, looking away. “I didn’t know he was your boss.” Her gaze shifted to Hank, almost accusatory. “I didn’t know.”
“Yes, well, I suppose it’s my turn to share,” Hank said, looking pointedly between the two of them and taking his own seat. “If you’ll allow me?”
They nodded, leaning in.
“When Julia’s mother left us in her late teens, her mother and I were…
shattered. We kept asking ourselves what we’d missed, what we could have done differently.
She had always been…challenging.” He said the word slowly, carefully, as though turning it over in his mouth and finding it too small for everything it needed to hold.
“There was a quiet storm in her. A sense that something inside her hurt, even when she couldn’t name it.
We told ourselves it was just the usual teenage pushback, but looking back…
” He exhaled. “Looking back, I think she was carrying more than any of us understood.”
He rubbed a hand across the table absentmindedly.
“We should have taken her to someone who knew what they were doing—doctors, counselors. We didn’t have the language for it then.
Our generation wasn’t good at recognizing when a young person was struggling in ways you couldn’t see on the surface.
Maybe we would’ve found a diagnosis, or at the very least a way for her to feel less alone.
But we didn’t. And that…well. That’s on us.
“When we finally tracked her down years later, she was married to Julia’s father and had Julia.
We reached out, but she kept her distance.
” His voice softened. “I don’t blame her entirely.
She wasn’t well—and not in the way people usually mean, but in the way that makes the world feel sharp and confusing.
It was easier for her to push us away than try to explain something she’d never had help untangling. ”
A faint smile touched his face. “Julia’s father called us the next day.
Good man. He wanted to support his wife, but he’d seen things that scared him.
Mood swings, anger that came out of nowhere, a fear of being left, followed immediately by threats to leave, moments when she’d say she felt…
hollow, like something was missing inside her that she couldn’t fix.
” He let the weight of that hang in the air.
“He was asking for guidance. We wanted to help him, but we were stuck in the same place we’d always been—loving her, worried for her, and utterly unprepared. ”
He fell quiet for a moment before continuing.
“We told him to stay in touch, and he did. We learned when she had left the family. Her attempts to reach out again, here and there, but not to return. And a few years later, we got word—because we were still listed as her next of kin—that she had…” He paused, swallowing hard. “She had passed.”
The silence that followed was thick and gentle.
“We were never told whether it was an accident or whether life had simply become too heavy for her. I don’t know that we’ll ever have that answer.
What I do know is that she was a girl who struggled more than anyone ever realized.
” His voice wavered. “Losing her meant all the hoping and waiting—imagining she might walk through our door again—was suddenly gone. It was the end of a chapter we’d never wanted to close. ”
He gestured toward Julia with a trembling hand.
“And it meant she’d never get the chance to come back to you.
” Julia had been listening to the story, one she had already known for ages, for as long as she had known Hank was her grandfather.
But hearing it again cracked open something raw and vulnerable inside her, something she tried to keep hidden.
She knew tears were streaking down her cheeks unchecked, but she couldn’t bring herself to move, to wipe them away.
Ethan glanced at her, and she could feel the weight of his gaze. Then he reached over to squeeze her hand. When she looked at him, his eyes were glassy as well.
Clearing her throat, she said, “I found out about all of this when Hank told me all those years ago. I asked my dad why he’d never said anything about the trust fund. If he had even known.”
Hank nodded, a quiet agreement in his eyes. “He’d known. And he was a proud man. Wouldn’t take a penny for himself, said the sale from the cottage was enough to get him by.”
“Right,” she said, her voice softening. “Then, when your parents came up with the idea…” She shrugged, the remnants of awkwardness and fear around the situation, the decision she had made, closing up her throat.
“I just don’t understand,” Ethan said bitterly after a beat. “If you knew all along, knew the connection, knew about…about me, about her, why would you keep it from me? How did I even—what were the odds that I would get this job without either of us knowing who the other was?”
“That was something beyond my control,” Hank admitted.
“At least when it came to you finding the position. Even when you first started with us. I didn’t bother to learn about the low-ranking employees, at least not on a personal basis.
If you were doing your job and doing it well, that was all I cared about.
But you moved up the ranks quickly, didn’t you?
” He looked at Ethan admiringly, maybe even with a touch of pride. “You made sure you were noticed.”
“So you expect me to believe that it was all a coincidence? You, Julia, her family, me, and the way I tie into all of it? This?” Ethan swept his arms out, encompassing the room. “With all due respect, Mr. Fordham—”
“Hank,” her grandfather interrupted. “You’ve called me Henry before, might as well make it Hank now.”
“With all due respect, Mr. Fordham,” Ethan repeated through gritted teeth, “I can’t help but feel a bit manipulated.”
And hadn’t they all been, Julia thought wryly.
Hank had manipulated her as well, in a sense.
Knowing that she was out there at the bed-and-breakfast, sending Ethan to her or at least steering him in that direction, orchestrating this whole reunion without her knowledge.
Not telling her that he was Ethan’s boss despite being aware of the connection.
Once their relationship had been a bit more established, she had confided in Hank about Ethan.
The rawness of his lack of communication was still an open wound in the months following that fated night, and she’d had to talk about him to someone.
Her dad had never been good for those heart-to-hearts.
The friends she’d had from college would have encouraged her to move on; they wouldn’t have understood.
And anyone who had known them from high school was long gone—relationships had fizzled out almost the moment geographic proximity to one another ceased to be a thing. She was a bit…alone, admittedly.
So an elderly widower grandfather—her maternal grandmother had passed years prior, before Julia had even had a chance to get to know her—seemed as good a confidant as any.
And he was a good listener, she found. He was able to cut to the core of any issue, offer advice when needed, and just listen when advice was not warranted or necessary.
Maybe he had manipulated things a bit between them now, but whatever he had been to her before, the relationship that had developed, that was real.
The money she didn’t see as manipulation, either—it was more about what had happened to her mother, the life she had led, the mistakes she had made, but also the decisions she had made, a way to do right by her once more in the end.
Julia no longer felt anger toward her. Instead, there was love, and profound sadness.
For the way everyone had failed her mother in her life and the way she had still tried to do the best she could in the best way she knew how.