He grinned. “Their design portfolio. They’ve been working on it since school let out. I’ve not been allowed to look, but Cal says it’s something.”
“Is that a good something or a ‘be afraid’ something?”
“Probably both.” Mo’s laughter eased the final knot of tension from her chest. He pulled glasses from his small cupboard and poured iced tea for both of them. “But back to your point—yes, I was in the dark too long.” His eyes held hers. “The light is a much better place to be.”
She picked up the vase from the desk and held it. “I’m sorry, Mo. You were never broody and moody ... before...”
He came around the counter, returned the vase to his desk, and put his hands around her waist. “Okay. Let’s get it all out. I’m not saying we’ll never talk about it again, but let’s rip this Band-Aid off. I left town for the summer and when I came home, you were gone. And yes, it nearly destroyed me.”
She refused to look away. She’d done this. She would own it. But she couldn’t stop the tears burning at the backs of her eyes.
“You were manipulated and used, and it nearly destroyed you.”
He wasn’t wrong, but, “I have to take responsibility for what I did.”
He brushed at a tear that broke loose. “Okay. Fine. You take responsibility for what you did at sixteen. I’ll take responsibility for what I did on a busy city street before I was deployed and then what I did again when Mom was in the hospital a few years later.”
“I don’t blame you.”
“You should.” He pressed a finger to her lips when she triedto argue. “It isn’t healthy to ignore the past. When you do that, it comes back to bite you.” His hand fell to her arm. “But it isn’t healthy to live in the past either. I spent too long dwelling there, stewing in the hurt and the anger. That’s on me, Bronwyn. You didn’t do that. We all choose how we want to handle the hard things. I chose to be a jerk. I chose to lash out at others. I became the poster child for ‘hurt people hurt people’ and I was miserable.”
He pressed his forehead to hers. “And then one day, this little girl showed up. And my scraggly self scared her. She was five years old, and she didn’t know me from before, the way my cousins did. My family saw me as my hair grew and my attitude darkened, and they accepted me. But this little sweetheart wasn’t sure that I was safe.”
“She didn’t know—”
“She was five and she reacted to the external.” Mo pointed to the pictures on his desk of him with Eliza. “It didn’t take me long to win her over. But what she may never know is how much seeing myself through her eyes helped me realize how self-absorbed I’d become. I’ve done a lot of self-reflection, therapy, prayer, and hard conversations with Cal and Meredith. I’m not the same person I was. But the darkness isn’t so far removed that it doesn’t show up from time to time.”
“I didn’t know.”
“I didn’t tell you.”
“I wouldn’t let you.”
“It wouldn’t have mattered.” Mo pressed a kiss to her forehead. “For whatever reason, our time wasn’t then.”
Bronwyn dared to look him in the eyes when she asked, “Do you think it’s our time now?”
Mo didn’t hesitate. “I want it to be.”
“So do I.”
“We’ll mess up.”
“Of course we will.”
“But I won’t shut you out when you try to talk to me about hard things.” Mo crossed his heart, then reached down, took her hand, and pressed a kiss to one knuckle. “And I’ll let you replace my coffee.” A kiss to the next knuckle. “And I’ll figure out who is behind the money mess at The Haven.” Another knuckle, another kiss. “And I’ll be nice to your parents.” His face grew serious. “But I won’t lie to you about the fact that I don’t like them.”
“Fair enough.” She didn’t like them much either.
He reached for her other hand and repeated the same procedure. “I will tell you you’re beautiful every day. I’ll continue to work with June to be sure you eat enough, and when this mess is resolved, I’ll date you the way we should have dated in our teens. We’ll go to the movies, and you can whisper all the secrets about the stars. I’ll go for hikes with you so you can take photos of random tiny flowers on the trail, and every night, I’ll tell you how lucky I am that you gave me another chance.”
Mo’s hands slid to her upper arms and squeezed. “I’m not telling you all this to try to force you to reciprocate. This isn’t a ‘define the relationship’ conversation. Our relationship defies definition. It always has. What this is, is me giving you the good and the bad.”
“I didn’t hear any bad.”
“That’s because I’m not done.”
“Oh.”
