He goes silent.
“She left?” I prompt after a few moments.
“She packed up one night and went back to France,” he answers, voice flat.
My next question is selfish, but I have to ask. “Do you miss her?”
He looks at me, reaches to brush my hair away from my face. I realize I’m bracing for the worst.
“Honestly...” He stares off into the distance. “No. I don’t. It took a while, but I know now that even if things had gone better between us, we wouldn’t have made each other happy for the rest of our lives. It’s not losing her that I still regret; it’s how it happened. I...I...”
He sounds like he’s choking on the shame.
“It’s okay.” I reach for him, cling to him. “It’s okay.”
“It took me weeks before I even started missing her.” He admits it like a confession. “I loved this woman so much I wanted her to be my wife, and it took me a month before I even really cared that she was gone. That’s how focused on my work I was.”
“But you’re different now,” I assure him, and I know it’s true. The man in my arms is not heartless. The man I’m holding wouldn’t repeat the same mistakes he made years ago.
“I don’t know,” he murmurs. “I don’t know if I am, but I want to be.”
“Wanting to be different means you’realreadydifferent.” I step back and place my hands on his shoulder to make sure he pays attention. “That’s how people grow. You’re not the same as you were. You learned.”
His face gets hard. “I learned to keep people away from me.”
I drop my hands. I’ve never heard him sound so cold before.
“I...” he stammers. “I...I don’t want to hurt you, but I don’t want to let you go.”
I don’t say anything. We both went into this knowing it was against our better interests, but I didn’t realize just how much he was fighting to be with me.
“Something’s wrong with me, Monroe. There’s ambition, and then there’s...whatever I have. I always wanted to be like my father. He was always encouraging me, telling me I’d build something even bigger than he did. No one else understood why I didn’t want the wineries, but he knew. He knew what it was like to want to look at an empire and know it started with a seed you put in the ground yourself. He’s the reason I haven’t used any family money for my business. I want it to be mine. I don’t want to disappoint him, but if he knew what I’ve done, how I’ve made people feel...”
“I think he pushed you too hard.”
Julien blinks at me like he’s working out whether he should be angry or not.
“What?”
“You talk about him like he was this...superhero, and I know he must have been a good man and that I never met him so it’s not really my place to say, but it sounds like there were some ways he failed you as a father.”
Julien shakes his head. “He was the best father. I’m the one who failed.”
“He made you terrified of failing.”
The more I continue, the more I realize it must be true. The way Julien talks about his father has always set me on edge, and I couldn’t figure out why, but now I know. He made him believe there’s only one way to measure success, only one type of accomplishment that actually counts for anything.
“He set you up for failure. It’s okay to actually be happy with what you’ve got. It’s okay to look at your life and know it might not be the best or most impressive in the world. It’s okay to enjoy it anyway.”
He stands there with this look on his face like he’s wrestling monsters in his mind.
“I hate...I hate seeing you hurting,” I admit.
It feels like one of the most intimate things I’ve ever said to him. The words pull him out of his trance, and he moves to pin me between him and the counter. His hands grip the metal on either side of me, caging me in, and he lowers his forehead until it’s pressed to mine. We both close our eyes. I can feel his breath on my lips.
“I stop hurting,” he murmurs, “when I’m with you.”
“Come home with me.” The words leave my mouth before I can stop them. “Spend the night.”
