She takes a deep breath, her gaze locking with mine once more.
“Knowing that you chose me, after everything.”
“You think I would have chosen anyone else?” I reply, tightening my grip on her.
“No, it’s not that I thought you would—that you wouldn’t do the right thing, exactly,” she replies, furrowing her brow, as though she’s searching for the right words to express herself. “It’s that I haven’t had a family before. You know? Someone who was on my side, someone who was willing to go to bat for me when I needed it most.”
She glances over to the twins, her expression softening.
“I thought it would be enough to have it with them,” she continues. “Like, I could give them the childhood I had wanted for myself, and it would fix the fact that I’d never been able toexperience it. But it wasn’t…it wasn’t that simple. There’s more to it than that.”
I stay silent, letting her speak. I can tell how important this is for her, almost as though she’s cracking herself open so I can get a look at what’s inside, and I don’t want to scare her into silence all of a sudden.
“My parents didn’t want me,” she explains. “And all the foster families I went through, none of them really saw me as anything other than a way to make a few easy bucks. I never felt like I had a place to call home, or a family of my own, or people who would choose me over anyone else. And you…”
She bites her lip.
“You did,” she finishes up, simply. “You did, Martin. And I don’t think I’ll ever be able to tell you how much that means to me.”
I don’t reply, at least not in words. Reaching for her hand, I lift it to my lips, not breaking her gaze as I plant a kiss against her knuckles. Hearing those words come out of her mouth, I see it now, how all of it falls into place. All the pain she has suffered, the way it has ached through every part of her being, and how this gesture on my part helps to fill in some of those blanks.
For a moment, neither of us say a word. I’m not sure what there is to be said after such a candid confession. But I suppose it’s on me to tell her why I let things get the way they did, why I allowed by son free rein to do what he wanted and to cause her so much harm in the process.
“I’m just sorry I didn’t do it sooner,” I murmur to her. “And that I let him get away with so much?—”
“You don’t have to apologize for that,” she counters. “You couldn’t have known what he was doing to me, practically nobody did?—”
“No, I didn’t,” I agree. “But I knew that he was capable of terrible things. He has been since he was a boy, and when he started growing up, it only got worse. The way he treated people, his temper, how he lashed out when he didn’t get what he wanted, I should have known that he would eventually turn that on a partner. But I suppose I just didn’t want to acknowledge that I could have raised a child who was so…”
There aren’t words to describe the person that he is, and it would be an insult to her to try. For all that Martha and I have seen the depths of Thomas’s cruelty, I can’t even imagine how much worse the side of him that Lila saw was.
“I didn’t want to take responsibility for it, so I just looked the other way,” I tell her. “And I know it caused so much harm. Not just for you, but for everyone he encountered. He never had to deal with the blowback from what he did and it just let him believe that he could get away with anything he wanted.”
“You don’t have to blame yourself for that,” she tries to comfort me. “He was a grown man when he did all of that to me. The choices he made, they were his choices to stand by, and?—”
“That’s why I was so shocked when I found out about the twins,” I admit, before I can stop myself. Now that I’ve unlocked this part of me, it feels impossible to hold it all back, and the words come spilling out. “I—I was worried that I would do the same thing again. That whatever was in me that I passed down to him, I would have passed down to them too.”
“You know that isn’t how it works,” she protests. “You’re a doctor, right? You know there are so many factors that go into the way someone acts?—”
“What I know and what I feel are on different sides of the damn planet,” I reply, forcing a smile to ease some of the tension. “And it didn’t matter what I knew about child rearing and genetics and all of that. I could only see myself making all the same mistakes again, and creating more children who were…like him.”
Her lips part in surprise, and she looks over to the twins, realizing that I’m talking about them. “You can’t seriously have thought that they could ever?—”
“It isn’t what I thought they were capable of, or you, for that matter,” I admit. “It’s what I am capable of. Or not capable of. I couldn’t stop torturing myself, thinking about what might happen if the same thing went down again. If they turned out the same way because of my influence.”
Realization seems to dawn over her face as she begins to slot the pieces together, everything I’ve just told her falling in line with my actions up to this point.
“Is that why you tried to keep things so…formal when you first reached out to me?”
I nod. “I didn’t want to tell you the truth, and I should have just been honest from the start,” I concede. “But I didn’t want you to think less of me. Let my own ego get in the way, I guess.”
“God, Martin,” she murmurs, and she grips my hand a little tighter. “I never thought of you that way. Never. The way you treated me that first night we met, how you looked after me when I was at my lowest, nobody had ever done something likethat for me before, not in my life. If that’s all I’d ever known about you, it would have been enough, but then…”
She tips her head to the side slightly.
“I got to know you,” she continues. “And I got to see how much sweetness there is under the surface. I got to see how kind you are, how you would go out of your way to look out for the twins, how you’d step up to do the right thing even when it wasn’t easy. And now, the way you protected me against Thom, it’s just…”
She draws in a deep breath, gathering every piece of it together.
