Ella only looked away, her teeth locking down on her lower lip.
“Talk to me, Ella,” he said softly. “Am I reading things wrong? If you don’t feel the same, it’s okay to say so.”
She spun around at that, and when he saw the tears in her beautiful brown eyes he wished he could take back everything he had said. Nothing was worth making her hurt.
“You’re not reading anything wrong,” she said softly. “I care about you, Dalton. You’re so good to us. To all of us, not just Dove and me, but my parents too.”
“Your family is important to me,” he told her honestly.
“I… can’t be in a relationship,” she said softly, casting her eyes down at the snowy path in front of them.
“Lee,” he breathed. “You still miss him.”
He’d been worried about that.
“I’ll always miss Lee,” she said. “But no, that’s not it.”
“Dove?” he guessed.
That would hurt, but he understood full well how important it was to Ella to raise her daughter the best way she could. Maybe she didn’t want her to split her attention.
“It’s me,” Ella said flatly. “I’m not who you think I am.”
Dalton tried to take in her words, but they didn’t even make sense. Ella was Ella—she was Dove’s mother, Michael and Mary’s daughter, Andy’s sister, and she wasthe woman who made Dalton feel like he was burning up from the inside with hope.
“Of course you are,” he told her.
Who else could she be?
“I know you think I’m brave,” she said, frowning. “Everyone does. But when things really got bad, I just… I was selfish.”
“What do you mean?” Dalton asked, wishing she would lift her chin and look at him so he could read what was in her eyes.
“Lee was so sick,” she said softly, moving further down the path as if her feet were carrying her without her meaning to take a step. “By the time Dove was born, he was already weaker. And she didn’t sleep much…”
“That must have been so difficult,” Dalton said softly, trying to picture Ella as a young mother with a sleepless infant and a sick husband.
“It wasn’t Lee’s fault,” Ella said. “I knew that then and I know it now. But I felt so… alone. Both of them needed more than I had to give, and I was exhausted and…”
Dalton pressed his lips together. He wanted nothing more than to fill her silence with declarations that she was a saint and had never done anything wrong in her life, but he could tell that she needed to get this out.
“I was resentful,” she said suddenly, the words cutting through the snowy air as if they had been ripped out of her chest. “I tried to hide it from him, but Iknowhe felt it…”
It was an awful thought, but Dalton figured it was pretty normal. He’d felt resented plenty in his life, and hehadn’t caused the kind of obligation Lee had, whether he’d meant to or not.
“I spent a lot of time thinking about what my life should have looked like,” Ella went on. “Like I wasoweda healthy husband. Like Ideservedto do nothing but take care of my perfect baby and decorate my perfect apartment.”
“So you felt angry?” Dalton asked her.
“Yes,” she agreed. “If I’m being honest, I still do.”
He nodded. He couldn’t blame her for that, not at all. Her burden had been a cruelly heavy one for such a young woman.
“It should have been the happiest time in your life,” he said softly, nodding. “And instead, it was… the opposite of that.”
“It was the last of the time I had with Lee,” she said, shaking her head. “It wasn’t going the way we hoped, but it was all we had, it was everything. He saw that, he understood it. And I can see itnow. But at the time I just… I just spent it wishing I could escape.”
He could feel her hurt and guilt, pulsing in the air between them. He wished he could hold her close and let her break into sobs against his chest. But that wasn’t what she needed.
