Chapter 29 #2
“Seriously?” Ethan looked between them incredulously.
“Nothing I ever did was good enough for you two. Dad, if I made the junior varsity team, there would be that air of disapproval that I hadn’t made varsity.
Mom, every time I entered a room, you looked at me as if you wished there was another sibling or two trailing behind, as if just me wasn’t good enough—” He bit off his words before he continued.
Even still, his mother had paled, jaw slackening, and his dad looked taken aback, eyebrows almost reaching his receding hairline.
“Ethan, we never—” She raised a shaky hand to her forehead, eyes closing in the pain of lost memories. “It was never our intention to make you feel that way.”
“Yeah, son,” his father spoke up, voice gruff. “You were always—we always—”
His father, a man of few words as it was, seemed at a loss.
“I shouldn’t have brought up the Julia thing,” he said finally, voice still raw. “I just know that things were good when you two were getting along. When you had her to keep you rooted. I guess that meant that your mother and I—” He swallowed hard. “Maybe we didn’t do the best job of it ourselves.”
Ethan sighed, not wanting to make his parents feel guilty or apologize.
“I didn’t—it’s not that you guys didn’t do a good job.
You were—are—good parents. I just think there are some pills in life that have been harder to swallow than others.
And this Julia thing, it was one of them.
It made—” A lump formed in his throat, and he struggled to speak past it.
“It made things harder. Like coming here, for one. And being able to reconcile the thought that—that you gave her the cottage, not because she was capable—God knows she was and is—but that you thought that I wasn’t.
That I couldn’t be trusted with it. That I would”—he shrugged, throat working—“fuck it all up somehow.”
“Ethan—” His mother reached over and grasped his hand, squeezing it with surprising strength. “It wasn’t that at all, sweetheart.”
His father was already shaking his head at Ethan’s words, in agreement with his mother. “Not at all. In fact, we had hoped—”
“We thought—”
Both his parents cut themselves off and looked at him then, guilt and the shadow of old hope in their eyes, and he could see exactly what they had thought. What they had hoped.
That he and Julia would take it over together. That it would be both of theirs.
Still, it had been a misstep. They had to have known it was a misstep—tying him down to that sort of commitment when he’d been so unsure at that time of what he’d truly wanted.
“We were wrong,” his father finally said, confirming his thoughts.
“We wanted to do what was best for both of you, secure both of your futures and keep you linked together in a way that had worked so well for so long. You just seemed…better together. Not in a way that negated who you were alone. But in a way that built on your strengths. There was always so much potential for you and her.” He shook his head.
“We had no right to play it out like that, though. To play God, as though we could dictate the future.”
“No,” Ethan affirmed quietly, “you didn’t.” He scrubbed his hand heavily over his face. “But I see why you did it. And I can’t say it was the wrong choice. She’s—” He hated himself for the crack in his voice. “She’s done so well with it, Dad. She’s done a really great job.”
“Yeah,” his mom agreed in a watery tone.
“We’ve seen it. She really has.” She sighed, lips twisting.
“But we never wanted you to think that she somehow replaced you or that we didn’t trust you with it.
Like your father said, it was a gamble. And maybe it paid off in some ways, but in others—” Tears trickled out from under her eyelids as she closed her eyes shut tightly. “In others, we ruined everything.”
“No, Mom—” Ethan moved his hand so it was palm up, and it was his turn to squeeze his mother’s hand.
“You didn’t ruin anything. Maybe we needed this, me and Gem.
Maybe we needed the distance to realize we weren’t”—he waved his hand, searching for the words—“meant to be, or two halves of the same whole. We needed the reality check. Because we were floundering in New York after college. Working at that restaurant and wondering what direction our lives were going to take. I had dreams, and so did Julia, and those dreams were different from each other. But you selling her the cottage aligned more closely with hers than it did…with mine…”
As he spoke, he came to the slow, dawning realization of a conclusion that had taken him almost ten years to reach. The cottage had been Julia’s dream, not his. And when that dream had landed in her lap, she’d had no choice but to take it.
And his parents—maybe they’d been misguided in their hope, but it had come from a good place. It had come from a place of love and the belief that Ethan and Julia would have been able to make something together. To build a life.
Maybe it just hadn’t been the right time for it. But that didn’t mean that the idea itself was wrong. His parents had seen something that he hadn’t—couldn’t have seen. Not at that age. Not when he’d had mistakes to make and more life to live.
He looked at both his parents then. His parents, whom he loved, and whom he’d missed all those years when he’d avoided them. They looked older now, wearier. But they were still his parents. And they’d done the best they could.
“You made the right choice,” he said finally, squeezing his mom’s hand again and then reaching out to grab his dad’s as well.
“Julia is in the right place, and she’s done amazing things with that cottage.
Turned it into her dream come true, and it’s so perfect for her, I can’t imagine things turning out any other way. ”
“You went?” his mom asked then, eyes searching his, eyebrows raised. “You saw it?”
It was time to tell his parents where he had been before he’d come up to see them.
To tell them the whole story—about Julia and Donwell, about this job, about Mr. Fordham’s role in all of it.
And to tell them everything he’d felt growing up, everything he’d already shared with Julia—the inadequacies, the feeling that he’d never been good enough, that he hadn’t had a solid place to call his own.
It was finally time for all of them to do something they hadn’t done in years.
Time to talk.
* * *
The shoebox of old photos that he’d spilled out onto his bed was like a time capsule.
Pictures he didn’t even remember having taken—of the cottage, of the lake, and of Julia.
Again and again, pictures of Julia.
It had been his mom who had brought them up through tears, though not of dismay but rather of a bittersweet nostalgia for the years that had passed and those she had perhaps missed due to her own problems and vices.
She had been the one to find them on the top shelf of the linen closet, to pull them out one by one, handling them delicately, like the wings of butterflies pressed between her two fingers. All pictures that Ethan had taken.
“Look at your talent,” she’d said, “even then. Your eye for composition and detail. All your life, it was sports and it was parties and friends. But you had a gift for this, too. You just needed to see it for how important it was at the time. Just as important as all those other things.”
And now Ethan wasn’t just looking—he was finally seeing.
The pictures were nice, yes, and clearly—even he had to admit to himself—the result of hard work and innate talent, even at a young age.
Before the time of digital pictures, all the film he’d gotten developed, and not just of sunsets on the lake.
He’d captured the way raindrops clung to the cottage window on a stormy afternoon, turning the outside world into soft watercolor.
He’d taken a perfect, impossible shot of a dragonfly resting on the edge of a canoe paddle, its wings haloed in sunlight.
There was the photograph of two smaller footprints ahead of his on the dock—Julia’s feet leading him forward, always.