“Yes, and I apologize. It’s just...can’t you see how frustrating this is? We belong together. It makes sense. I know you love me, Mal. I know it. I could feel it in your kiss today. And other times, too. Yet you’re sitting here telling me that we can’t be together for reasons that don’t make sense.”
“That’s because you can’t feel the results of them.”
No, he couldn’t. He didn’t get it. But he knew that marrying Mallory again was the right thing to do. He sat down.
“So tell me how it feels.”
“Your inability to understand my emotions makes me feel like a freak. It got so bad that by the time you moved out I felt like I had to cry in the bathroom with the fan on even when I was the only one home.”
He stared at her. What on earth was she talking about?
“I was ashamed, Bray. Every single time pain welled up, I’d choke it back down. I hated that it was there, like it made me weak. And when I was happy or excited, you’d humor me.”
He didn’t remember it that way.
“You could never join me in being excited about anything,” she continued. “Like this afternoon, I told you the babies are okay and you just stood there. I was ready to climb to the roof and fly, or to laugh and dance. But I’d have been doing it alone. When I told you we were having girls, again you just stood there.
“I got nothing, Bray. And that’s fine for me now. With us being friends. But think what living with that would do to our baby girls. They’d grow up learning to curtail their excitement, their joy and their sorrow, too, because little girls have an inborn instinct to please their daddies. You might not mean to teach them that, but they’d take it all in on an instinctive level. Just as I did.”
Okay. Wow. Braden didn’t have any idea what to make of that.
He stood. “So, just to be clear, you’re telling me that because I don’t get giddy or have crying fits, I’m not the right man for this family?”
It wasn’t really what she’d said. But it seemed pretty damned close.
“I’m telling you that we’re just too different, Bray, in a way that neither one of us can help.”
So she thought he wasn’t meant to ever have kids? Because he’d “rob them of their joy”?
That was another phrase from the counselor who’d done no good.
“I get excited,” he told her. He reminded her of the time he’d caught a twenty-pound bass on a camping trip they’d taken early on in their marriage.
“Of course you do. But when the chips are down, when something is really important, bone-deep important, you aren’t there.”
“Where am I?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Believe me, I’ve tried to figure that one out. You just space, Bray. And that’s not wrong or bad. It’s what works for you. It just doesn’t work for me.”
Sit in the fire with her.
Go deep into the woods with her.
He recalled the therapist’s advice.
Mallory was right.
But it just wasn’t him.
Turning his back on the only life that made sense to him, Braden quietly let himself out.
Chapter Eighteen
Mallory felt awful. On what should have been one of the best days of her life she felt like total and complete crap.
The only consolation, if she could call it that, was that Braden wouldn’t be feeling the pain she’d caused him nearly as acutely as she did.
It killed her to hurt him.