“And let’s talk aboutyou,” my father said. “Your son isn’t the only one taking this breakup poorly.”
“I’m fine.” I crossed my arms and leaned back in my chair.
“You’re miserable and you’re doing a shit job hiding it,” Drew insisted. “You need to get her back. For both of your sakes.”
“Oh yeah, you think so?” I forced myself to keep talking. I needed to explain the full story of what had happened—why I’d needed to break up with Nina. Maybe once they heard all of it, they’d finally understand. “I never told you why we took our eyes off Noah at the park, when he fell. We were actually fighting. She’d come up with this crazy idea to ship Noah off to someartcamp. Without even talking to me!”
The three of them looked at me with blank expressions.
“And?” Harrison prompted.
“Well, she did all of this research, like she assumed that I was going to be totally okay with signing him up for an overnight camp.”
“So she signed him up without your permission?” Harrison asked, squinting at me like I was a puzzle he was struggling to put together—maybe one with a few pieces missing.
“Well…no, not exactly.”
He nodded, still squinting at me.
“And this research she did,” Drew seemed to pick up on Harrison’s line of thinking. “Was it to give you a full picture of the camp, so you could weigh in on whether or not you wantedNoah to go? Like, she did the necessary leg work so you could make an informed decision?”
I huffed, hating how reasonable he made it sound. “I mean, yeah, I guess, but still. Can you believe thepresumptionthat I would be okay with sending Noah away?” I trailed off as they glared at me in unison. “Anyway, that fight is the reason why Noah fell. We lost our focus.”
My dad chuckled. “Ah, okay, so you think that if you’d kept a closer eye on Noah then you’d be able to keep him from harm?”
“Well—”
“Son, I’ve got three files filled with the medical mishaps from you boys. Most of them taking place with me or your mother less than ten feet away. Bumps and bruises happen. And it’s unrealistic to think that you can shield Noah from every bit of pain in the world.”
“That’s not the point,” I insisted.
“And what is?” Harrison asked.
“I should’ve learned my lesson with Gretchen. She did the same thing—she tried to send Noah away.”
“You really think you can compare the two?” Harrison mused.
“If a guy buys his girlfriend flowers because he loves her and seeing beautiful things makes him think of her, and another guy buys his girlfriend flowers because he just cheated on her and he feels guilty, would you say they’re exactly the same?” Drew asked. “After all, they both just bought their girlfriend flowers.”
I scoffed. “Of course that’s not the same.”
“Because motive matters, right? You can’t just look at the action and think that tells you everything you need to know.”
I shook my head, not wanting to admit he had a point.
“Things with Gretchen got messy because that whole relationship was a mess, and you know it,” Harrison said. “And yeah, when she looked into camp for Noah, she was doing it because she wanted him out of the way. But that doesn’t mean that wasNina’smotive. You know her better than that. She couldn’t be like Gretchen in a million years. That kind of coldness just isn’t in her.”
My stomach twisted as he voiced the thoughts I had already started to think. All the same, I didn’t want to listen. If Harrison was right, then I threw away a relationship with a good woman for nothing. Shehadto be like Gretchen. The alternative—that I was wrong—was too painful to think about. “What’s your point?” I asked, stubborn to the end.
“My point is that you fell for Nina in a way you never came close to falling for Gretchen. Ending it didn’t really hurt because you never truly cared for her that deeply in the first place, right? It was a relationship of convenience. And did Noah even notice once Gretchen was gone? Compare how he acted after you and Gretchen broke up to what’s happening now. You said it yourself: the kid is inconsolable.”
I hated his logic.
Harrison watched me silently before continuing. “It’s not love that made this mess. It was letting love go.”
The four of us breathed out a woosh of air at the same moment over his take. It was a chilling summary of my life that I didn’t even want to consider.
“I don’t have the bandwidth to deal with all of this,” I insisted. “The ups and downs, themessiness. I’m better off without it. Noah is too, even if he doesn’t realize it yet.”
