Gunnar shrugged. “He did not believe in spoiling me. Which to him meant not giving me any softness. He left me locked in my room for large swaths of time—primarily from the time I was twelve to fourteen, after that he began to take me to different events. If I didn’t perform the way he wanted me to...there would be consequences.”
“He hurt you,” she said, her chest feeling like lead.
“Yes.”
“But look at all this. Look at how you...you want to give different things to our child. That matters. It counts for something.” She needed him to know that. He looked so bleak she just...needed him to know that.
“The past has shaped me into the man I am today, and a room full of toys and good intentions doesn’t... There is only so much I can offer.”
He meant that. She could see that he did. But she just didn’t understand why. She could see that he cared. She could see it in this room around her.
She could feel it in his touch.
“The past doesn’t matter. It doesn’t have to matter.”
And then something shuttered in his expression. “I wish that were so. But as far as I’m concerned... One must learn from the past. Or there was never any point to it at all.”
And then he walked away. From the moment, as he always did.
But the nursery remained. A real, beautiful testament to something, to more.
What he’d wanted as a child.
What he wanted to be as a father.
Why was he like this? Why was he so infuriating. So maddening, and yet so wonderful, all at once. Why was... It seemed like they had a connection. It just seemed also like he would want to deny it.
And everything in her ached for that to not be the case.
But she could not ignore the fact that he seemed remote. That he’d said he would never love.
Well. She was beginning to think she had never really been loved before.
Her father had affection for her. He had been kind to her—conditionally. But it wasn’t the same. It certainly wasn’t the same as what she wanted to give to her child.
She blinked, scrunching her eyes tight.
She would make it through this. And she would not give in to despair. She had this room, and it showed that he saw her. On some level, he saw her.
And in the dark of night when she slept in this bed alone, she would remember that, and the way he had held her in the hot springs, and she would use that to keep her warm and insulated against all the ice.