“Why?”
Beatrice looked straight at me.
“Because he was planning to leave you.”
The words landed harder than anything else she had said.
I stared at her.
“No.”
“Elodie—”
“He promised me.”
“I know.”
“He found me under the table and promised he wasn’t leaving.”
“That happened the next morning.”
I stood so quickly the chair scraped backward.
“So he lied.”
“Yes.”
I could barely breathe.
“All these years, I thought he stayed because there was never a question.”
Beatrice’s voice remained gentle.
“There was a question.”
A painful silence filled the kitchen.
Then she continued.
“He sat right where you’re sitting now and told me he couldn’t do it again.”
“Do what?”
“Love another little girl.”
My anger faltered.
Beatrice’s eyes filled.
“He said every time you ran across a parking lot, his heart stopped. Every fever terrified him. Every time you fell asleep against him, he remembered carrying Tessa.”
I sank slowly back into the chair.
“He told me, ‘If I love Elodie like my own daughter, one day I could lose her like I lost Tessa. I won’t survive it twice.’”
My throat tightened.
“So he wanted to leave before he loved me too much?”
Beatrice gave a sad little laugh.
“No, sweetheart.”
She reached across the table.
“He wanted to leave because he already did.”
I began crying.
Not neatly.
Not quietly.
Beatrice let me.
After a while, I whispered, “What did you say to him?”
“I told him fear wasn’t a good enough reason to abandon a child who had just lost her mother.”
She squeezed my hand.
“I told him he could spend the rest of his life running from grief, or he could go home and be somebody’s father again.”
“And he went home.”
“At sunrise.”
Suddenly I remembered Harlan crawling beneath the table.
His tired eyes.
His outstretched little finger.
I had believed he promised to stay because staying was easy.
Now I understood that he had promised after spending an entire night fighting the strongest urge he had to run.
