All They Need(82)

But Flynn was not Owen, and if she’d stopped to really think about it she would have anticipated this question because Flynn was a man made for family life. The way he cared for his parents, his bone-deep nurturing instincts… He would make a great father.

“I need to check on the garden. Make sure the timer tap is working…”

It was the feeblest of excuses, but she let him go, watching him walk from the room, his shoulders very square. She let her breath out in a rush and pressed her hands to her stomach.

She felt sick. In protecting herself, she’d hurt a wonderful man. A man she cared for a great deal. A man who had become very important to her very quickly.

You may have lost him. You know that, right?

The possibility reverberated inside her, grim and very real. Flynn had had plans for them, hopes. Expectations. She’d seen it in his eyes. He’d even said it—I want to share my life with you. And she’d fenced off a lot of those hopes and expectations. She’d corralled him into a relationship that operated on her terms, for her protection.

She closed her eyes, thinking about the confusion and hurt she’d seen in his face. He didn’t understand that she had reasons—good reasons—for her decisions. He said he did, but he couldn’t, not really, because she’d never told him the truth about her marriage. She’d been too ashamed. And he’d never asked, because he was too good a man to push her into something he knew she found uncomfortable.

She opened her eyes. Then she walked to the counter and poured herself a glass of wine. She swallowed it in one big gulp. The wine warmed her throat before it hit her stomach. She stared into the glass, thinking about what she needed to do.

After a few seconds she put down the glass and went in search of Flynn.



HE DIDN’T UNDERSTAND. That was the bottom line. Flynn knew Mel was scared and wary, but he hadn’t understood that her resistance to a relationship ran so deep, and he didn’t understand how anyone could close herself off to the future so comprehensively.

Mel had always struck him as being brave and bold. Her laughter, her smile, her earthy sexuality—he’d always thought she was the sort of person who took life by the scruff of the neck and shook it.

Yet she didn’t want to live with him. She didn’t want marriage. And she hadn’t even thought about children.

He sat on the sandstone bench on his rooftop garden and put his head in his hands. He felt as though he’d had the rug—the world—pulled from beneath his feet. All his life he’d waited to feel this connected to another human being, yet Mel didn’t want the connection. Or, more accurately, she wanted parts of it. Neatly apportioned parts. The friendship. The sex. The companionship.

She didn’t want shared responsibility and domesticity and the sort of deep, abiding knowledge of another person only gained through sleeping in the same bed night after night and sharing both the highs and lows and the grand and the not-so-grand challenges of life. She didn’t want children. She didn’t want to truly share herself and her life with him.

The worst thing was that he’d known, on some deep, instinctive level, that she wasn’t as committed as he was. And yet he’d still fallen in love with her. Hadn’t been able to stop himself.

He heard the scratch of dirt beneath a shoe and knew that Mel had come in search of him. He didn’t lift his head immediately, unsure that he could keep the disappointment he felt from showing in his face.

“I want to tell you something, but it’s really hard for me to talk about because it’s not something I’m very proud of,” she said.

Her words surprised him into lifting his head. He met her gaze.

“You can tell me anything, Mel.” He meant it, too. He loved her.



She sat beside him on the bench and took a deep breath.

“People always say that it’s impossible to understand a marriage from the outside looking in. I never really appreciated how true that was until I left Owen, because looking back over the six years we’d been together, even I couldn’t understand how things had gotten so ugly between us. How I’d let them get so ugly. Intellectually, I understand that it happened in increments, that one thing led to another, which led to another. I know that by the time we got to the end of the line, I was so worn down by his disapproval and anger, and his parents’ lack of acceptance, and by my own feelings of inadequacy and failure that I believed the things he said to me. My brain can see all that and process it and join the dots. But there’s a big part of me that still doesn’t understand why I let him treat me so badly.”