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“Wow. Was the proposal that bad?” she said before quickly apologizing. “Sorry, that was a bad joke. I say things sometimes without thinking.”
“Really? I never noticed,” he said sarcastically.
He glanced over at her, and she stuck her tongue out at him.
He smiled and turned his attention back on the road. “But the answer is yes. The proposal was bad. I bought her a ring and gave it to her in the McDonald’s drive through and said that we could get married if she wanted to.”
“A McDonald’s drive-through?” Viv repeated in horror.
“Yeah.”
“And no…I love you. I want to spend the rest of my life with you?”
“I never told her I loved her. I’ve never told any woman I loved them.”
“You asked someone to marry you that you didn’t love?”
“I wasn’t in love with her,” he clarified. He cared about Zoe, loved her as a person, but he’d never felt like he was in love with her. “And yes, I did. I wanted her to know that I would be there for her and the baby.”
“Wow…that’s honorable…I guess.”
The way she said honorable was like it was a bad word. “You guess?”
“I mean… I, personally, wouldn’t want any man to ask me to marry them unless they were so in love with me it made them physically ill to think about not being with me. Unless they couldn’t imagine spending the rest of their lives with any other person on this planet. Unless they were so madly in love with me it almost made them crazy.”
“Anything else they’d have to be?” he asked, amused at her take on what a man would have to feel before they asked her to marry him.
“Yes, actually. I sure as hell wouldn’t want them to hand me a ring and say that we could get married if I wanted to in the McDonald’s freaking drive-through.”
It wasn’t his most shining moment.
“I would want them to shout it from the rooftops, take out a billboard, have a plane fly above with a banner, or take me up in a helicopter ride and have the question written in the sand. Something big that tells the whole world how much the man loves me.”
“You’ve given this a lot of thought.”
“I watch a lot of reality TV. The proposals can be pretty epic.”
He grinned, loving the fact that he’d just gotten insight into what went on in her head. “It wasn’t the proposal that caused us to break up. She wasn’t ready to be a mom. She wanted to put the baby up for adoption. I told her that I would take sole custody and she could walk away with no responsibility.”
“Oh…but…she didn’t do that, obviously.”
Glenn adjusted his hands on the wheel. He hadn’t talked about this in so long, and the only people he’d ever really discussed it with were Gabe, Eric, and his old trainer Charlie Rizzo who had been like a second father to him. His family in Hope Falls knew about the situation but only because Gabe told Eric and he had filled them in. He’d never spoken to them about specifics.
“She did, actually. After she had Bree, she signed over full rights to me in the hospital and I took her home. I raised her for two years on my own. Then Zoe came back and asked if she could be a part of her life.”
“And you let her?” Viv didn’t sound judgmental, just confused.
Glenn nodded. “Zoe is a good person. She was just young. And she was raised in a really strict household. Her parents controlled everything. Once she graduated from college, she sort of went wild. Then she got pregnant and panicked. She wasn’t ready. She needed that time to go and have her freedom. I knew she wouldn’t have come back unless she was ready to take on the responsibility.”
“Wow. That’s so…”
Glenn was waiting for her to say stupid, naïve, or dumb. He knew that a lot of people in his position might not be so forgiving, but he just wanted the best for Bree.
“…mature,” Viv finished her thought.
Mature was not the word that most people in his life had used to describe what he’d done. Unwise was thrown around more than once. Everyone who knew the situation, including Gabe, had questioned whether or not he was doing the right thing.
He’d never defended his actions to anyone because it wasn’t anyone’s fucking business, but he found himself explaining what he’d done to Vivien.
