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Grace stood, her hands clenched at her sides as she stared at him. “Did you hear yourself? Did you hear how selfish you sound?”
“What? I’m trying to figure out what to do. I can’t do that without your help. I need you, Grace.”
She glared at him. “You never once talked about me, about how I feel, about what this will do to our lives together. All you can think about is doing what Deidre wants. She’s dead. She’s not coming back. And yet you didn’t, for one minute, stop and consider what I’m going through, did you? All you want from me is my help. You want me to make this better for you.”
She scraped her hair off her face and blotted her cheeks with her fingers, her voice shaking. “I’m just as important in this situation as you are, as Emma is. You need to consider my feelings, talk things out with me. But instead of that, you go on and on about what you’re going to do.”
He stared at her face, at the anger in her eyes. How had he gotten this so wrong? “Grace, I didn’t mean it that way. I’m so used to assessing a situation and deciding the best course of action to solve the problem. It’s how I think.”
Grace picked up her purse and slung it over her shoulder. “This is not a situation, Aidan. This is real life, where people you claim to love are in pain. Emma is going to miss her mother for a very long time. You are not going to have your lovely well-ordered life where every problem has a solution anymore. You will have to face each issue with your daughter with your heart not your head. But most of all, I will not have you making decisions without me having a say in how we do things. This is my life, my marriage, and I will no longer be told what decision you’ve made and simply go along with it.”
Shocked and suddenly terrified, by her words, her accusations of his selfishness ringing in his ears, Aidan jumped up. “What have I done? I’m as upset about all this as you are. I deal with it differently, mostly by focusing on what can be done, but that in no way means I don’t want your input on this.”
“You don’t get it, do you?”
“Get what?” he asked, confused and really, really scared in a way he hadn’t experienced since he got the news that Deidre had passed away.
“You and I need to go home and talk this over between the two of us before we make a decision that will change our lives forever. Lisa is clearly concerned for Emma. She will look after her as long as needed. A few weeks or a few months won’t make any difference. There’s no rush to sell the house. Emma may need to be left in her kindergarten to give her a chance to get over the loss of her mother before she faces any other changes.”
“Children adapt,” he said defensively.
“I’m sure she will, given time, love and caring. Meanwhile, if this is to work out for everyone involved, we need to go home, talk this all over and decide how we will cope with having a child dropped into the middle of our lives.”
“Dropped into the middle of our lives? Is that how you see this, as somehow something done to us? It may have been, but we’re the adults here. We understand what’s at stake.” How could Grace even consider leaving a little girl who had just lost her mother alone? This wasn’t like her, not at all. “Grace, I can’t leave Emma here without her family. We are her family now. I can’t do it, and neither can you. You love children. And this little girl lost her mother. We may have to move in here for a while, but in the end, she will be coming home with us.”
Grace’s eyes radiated a mix of anxiety and anger. “You’re not listening to me. This is too fast, way too fast. My life has been destroyed. I’m barely able to cope as it is. I need time to work this out. We both do if we are to stay together. It’s too much too soon. I need to…” She eased away from him. “I can’t stay here and watch you decide things based on what you want. There are three of us in this, three people’s feelings to consider. Ignoring what I want, my opinion and ideas, isn’t right. Life doesn’t work that way, Aidan.”
