“We are actually going,” he agreed. “I want to give you everything your heart desires.”
“You are what I desire. Always.” She looked at him. He was watching her with an expression she recognized now, the specific, unguarded quality that he reserved for moments when he did not bother to manage what his face was doing.
“This trip will be different though,” she said. “The thing I imagined and the thing we are actually doing. It’s entirely different.”
“Are you okay with that?”
“Yes.” She shook her head. “It’s completely different. The one I imagined was about escape. This one is about starting anew.”
They sat in companionable quiet as the light continued to fade. The motion of the carriage was steady and warm. After a while Oliver said, quite conversationally, “Can I ask you something?”
“Of course.”
“Children.” He paused. “Do you want them? I want to know what you want, not what you think I expect.”
“You will need an heir.”
“That doesn’t answer my question,” he persisted.
She looked at their joined hands. She had been thinking about it, in the margins of everything else. She had known he would ask, eventually.
“Yes,” she said. “I do.”
“But?”
She glanced at him. “You heard the but.”
“There was quite clearly a but.”
She exhaled slowly. “I am afraid I will ruin them.”
“You won’t ruin them.”
“Oliver.” She turned to face him. “I was taken as a child. I watched what happened to people who were kind to me. I learned to live in a world where danger could arrive from any direction at any time.” She shook her head. “What if I cannot let them out of my sight? What if I make every open door feel like a threat because every open door once was? What if I spend their entire childhoods trying to protect them from things that haven’t happened and are not going to happen, and in doing so I make them afraid of a world that needn’t frighten them?”
The carriage swayed gently on the road. Oliver was looking at her with great attention and not interrupting, which she appreciated.
“That is a completely reasonable fear,” he said.
“I know it is.”
“And it tells me something important about you.”
She waited.
“Bad parents,” he said, with the careful deliberateness he used when he was certain of what he was saying, “do not lie awake worrying about becoming bad parents. They simply proceed without the question ever occurring to them.” Hepaused. “Your fear of that specific harm is evidence that you will work against it. It is not evidence that you will cause it.”
She looked at him.
“Besides,” he said, “you will not be doing it alone.” He met her eyes steadily. “If you find yourself unable to let go of something, you tell me. That is what I am here for. You have spent years managing everything entirely by yourself, Megan, with no one to share the weight of it. That is over.”
“You make it sound very simple.”
“No,” he said. “I don’t think it will be simple. I think you will have days when the fear is stronger than the reasoning and it will be very hard indeed. But you will not be alone in it. And your children will not be alone with you in it.” He paused. “They’ll have Webb fussing over them within the year, which will give them a thoroughly unrealistic expectation of adult capability, but I don’t see how to prevent that.”
A sound escaped her that was nearly a laugh. “Webb is not fussing.”
“Webb bought the baby a pony. We don’t have a baby.”
