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He heard her footsteps, and she came close to where he was. “I’m here,” he said.
“What are you doing?” she asked, her voice trembling.
“I can’t do it. I can’t give you what you want and stay...the person that you need me to be. I’m sorry. I thought that I could do this. I wanted to do it. I wanted to do it when I thought that it would... When I thought I could control it,” he said, the words scraping raw out of his throat. “I thought that if I picked my best friend to be my wife I wouldn’t be in any danger of being like my dad, but look how I was tonight. Look at that. It was supposed to be a good night. We were supposed to go out and celebrate the baby, and I started a fight. I lost my fucking shit. How can you want to be married to me? How can you want to be married to this guy who treats you like this?” The words felt torn from him, like a part of him being ripped away. Walls torn apart inside him until there was nothing left.
“Lachlan,” she said. “Tonight was a mess. It was. You’re not wrong. But...Wedon’t have to be. We can do this.”
“You don’t know what you’re saying. You don’t know. The thing that haunts me is that I know my father loved my mother. I know that love can tip over into obsession, and I don’t know the difference.”
“It’s not love,” she said. “It’s not love when you would hurt the person that you’re supposed to protect. And you never would. You never would. I know that about you.”
“How? How can you know it? I don’t even know that about myself. Charity, I’m afraid. I’m afraid of what I could become... I can’t sleep with you. Because it makes me... I just... I want you so much. I don’t have any control over it. I don’t have any control over myself. And you’re right. It’s not love. My brothers, they love their wives. And it’s... Look what it does for them. But look at me.”
“I am,” she said. “I’m looking at you. I have been looking at you, Lachlan McCloud, since you were sixteen years old. And if you can’t know these things about yourself, then you need to let me know them. For you.”
“You just don’t... I know. I know, because I saw the way it made my dad hate me. The way my mom loved me. What if... What if I’m jealous of our own kid?”
“Then you’ll do something about it. We’ll talk to somebody. You’ll get help. Because you don’t want to be that bastard. I know you don’t.”
“I didn’t want any of this,” he said. “I didn’t want to feel this. I feel like... I feel like I can’t breathe. I have to go.”
“You can’t leave me.”
“I just need to leave. For a little bit. Charity, whatever happens, I’ll make sure that you’re taken care of. You know that.”
“I do know that,” she said. “I do know that. That’s why I’m not afraid. I don’t understand why you are.”
“You didn’t see it,” he said. “You didn’t see it. He wanted to kill me. He wanted to kill her. He locked Gus in a shed and set him on fire. And I remember... I remember standing outside that shed and watching it burn. And feeling so helpless. That’s how I feel. I can’t save us. I couldn’t save him when he was in there being burned alive. And this just still... It’s the same. I was broken from the time I was born. I was born with my dad hating me. I don’t know how to be anything else. I wanted to. I wanted to. I believed this could save me. But I just can’t.”
“Lachlan.”
And then he turned and walked away from her.
“Lachlan!”
He stopped, just for a moment. “You promised me,” she said. “You promised me that you would never leave me. You promised me that you were my friend.”
“I’m trying to give you what you deserve. My dad couldn’t let go when he needed to. I’m going to let go before it gets there. I owe you that. And I can give it to you. So I will.”
“You said you loved me.”
“I know I did. I said that I loved you, and now I’m not sure that I even had a right to say it. I do... I care for you. But I don’t know if I can be with you.”
“I’m fine,” she said. “You have to trust that I’m strong. You have to trust me that I’m not scared.”
“I know you’re not scared. Because I told you that you could trust me.”
“No. You showed me that I could trust you. For the last fifteen years. How are you going to turn around and act like now I can’t? It’s ridiculous. I know that I can trust you.”
“I don’t trust myself.”
“So what? Because of some existential fear that you might not be as good as you want to be, because you think there might be something wrong with you, you would leave me?”
“I wouldn’t abandon you. I’m just wondering if things worked better before. Because I didn’t have all this stuff coming up.”
“I think it’s unavoidable. When I found out I was pregnant I missed my dad. Now more and more I’m thinking about how my mother wasn’t with me. How she didn’t want me. I think that it starts to become more and more difficult because these changes in our lives force us to confront what we are and where we’ve been. But I spent a lot of my life hiding, Lachlan. And I’m not doing it anymore. I’ve found the thing that makes me happy. And it’s you. It’s worth it. It’s worth all the pain. It’s worth the suffering.
“It’s worth whatever we have to go through to make this forever. To make it real. To make it ours. It’s worth all that. So I’m willing to fight for it. I’m willing to go through this with you. To figure out what it means. You’re not a violent person.”
