A love he hadn’t deserved.
A love he had squandered.
And now he had the offer of love again, the offer of a life, from Olive.
How could he accept her love? How? He was wrong about all these sorts of things. He’d had love. He had love and he had squandered it. He had seen something shinier, something that he thought was better. And he had been wrong. So desperately wrong. He had stolen from himself a life of warmth and love and simplicity. And he had exchanged it for fists of fury and barren rooms. He had exchanged it for years where he had lived with a man who had done his level best to strip the humanity from him, and he had to fight for all that he was to cling to it. To cling to that cabin. To cling to its warmth. To remember that when his temper had flared his grandfather had taught him ways to cope with it. That his grandmother had showed him softness.
He had betrayed them. The cost had been everything. Everything. And they died. They died and he had never been back. How could he accept love now? How?
Knowing what he had squandered... Knowing how...
How little he could trust his own heart.
Perhaps he needed to trust hers.
Because he had been given love once. And it had been keen and clear and bright. And it was the same sort of love that he had seen reflected in Olive’s face.
His Olive. They were like nothing. He’d said that to her. And it was true.
If that’s not a miracle, then what is? Look at us. If we are not a miracle... I don’t know what is.
He had thought those feelings long dead in him. And he had thrown the issue of her betrayal in front of them, because it was easy. Because it was easy to tap into that old fury, that old hurt at the way he had been wrong about his father.
Far easier than admitting...
Of course he had always loved her. Of course. She was everything to him, and she had been for all this time. He had thought, not so long ago, that if he had been another man he might’ve loved her. But he always had.
He had just been desperate not to label it thus, because part of him knew...
If he wanted love, then he had to reckon with his past. If he wanted love, Olive was right. He had to let it go. To keep what warmed him, and to set aside what hurt him.
She had always been there. The only good thing. The only healing thing. Waiting to be ready. Waiting for him to be ready.
They were more than a miracle. They were fate. But fate was not going to chase him down.
He was going to have to do some work. No matter how hard it might be.
“I’m sorry,” he said, his breath coming out in a fog, the apology lingering in the air. “I am so sorry I left you. I didn’t know. I didn’t understand.”
He was bringing a child into this world. And perhaps that meant...perhaps that meant finding forgiveness for the boy he’d been.
The boy who had walked away from this and into a life of cold manipulation that had made him desperately unhappy.
His sin had been trust.
His sin had been loving someone undeserving of it.
Was that so unforgivable? Could he not release it?
And he suddenly knew, that he could not give his child the life he wanted without risking himself. He could not have Olive without risking himself. She was a bright, beautiful woman who showed him continually that she was his match in every way, and he was lowering himself. He was not giving her all that he could.
And he was doing it out of fear. He wanted to prove that he was the best, he had acted as if that put him above her. That he would not cheat on something like a project. But the truth of it was, Olive had been willing to compromise everything for the love of her father. Olive had been willing to risk herself to tell him that she loved him. And he hadn’t risked a damn thing for her. Olive was the brave one. She was the one that was honest.
He did not deserve her. He was not worthy of her. And suddenly, like a light in the darkness, he knew the truth.
It shone into the very depths of his soul, and kept him from being able to lie. To himself, to anyone else.
He had loved Olive for a very long time. It was only his cowardice that kept him from admitting it was so. And if he wanted to be half the man that she was a woman, he had to change everything now.