Tracy’s eyes were bleak, but she shrugged as if it didn’t matter. “See what I have to put up with? The minute I think he’s finally ready to talk, he shuts down. I might as well be married to a computer.”
“Stop acting like an ass,” Ren said. “No guy wants to spill his guts in front of an ex-husband. He’s been trying to talk to you all day.”
“Big deal. I’ve been trying to talk to him for years.”
Isabel glanced toward the garden. “He doesn’t seem like a man who’s too comfortable with his feelings.”
“I’ve got a news flash for both of you,” Ren said. “No man is comfortable with his feelings. Get over it.”
“You are,” Tracy said. “You talk about how you feel, but Harry has terminal emotional constipation.”
“I’m an actor, so most of what comes out of my mouth is bullshit. Harry loves you. Even a fool can see that.”
“Then I’m a fool, because I’m not buying it.”
“You’re not fighting fair,” Isabel said. “I know it’s because you’re hurt, but that doesn’t make it right. Give him a chance to say what’s on his mind without an audience.” Isabel pointed at the door. “And listen with your brain when you talk to him, because your heart’s too bruised right now to be reliable.”
“There’s no point! Don’t you understand? Don’t you think I’ve tried?”
“Try again.” Isabel gave her a firm push toward the door.
Tracy looked mulish, but she went outside.
“I already want to kill them both,” Ren said, “and we haven’t even had the appetizers.”
Harry stood by the pergola, hands shoved in his pockets, the frames of his glasses picking up the last rays of sun. Tracy felt that familiar dizziness that had first plagued her twelve years ago, right before she’d dumped her drink in his clueless lap.
“Isabel made me come out here.” Tracy heard the hostility in her voice, but she’d begged him once today, and she wasn’t going to do it again.
He pulled his hand from his pocket and braced it on the side of the pergola, not looking at her. “What you said this morning… Were you just throwing up another one of your smoke screens? About being fat and having stretch marks, when you know damned well you get more beautiful every day? And saying I don’t love you when I’ve told you a thousand times how I feel?”
Words uttered by rote. “I love you, Tracy.” No emotion behind them. Never, “I love you because…” Just, “I love you, Tracy. Don’t forget to buy more toothpaste when you go to the store.”
“There’s telling and there’s believing. Two different animals.”
He slowly turned to her. “It’s never been my love in question, not from the beginning. It’s always been yours.”
“Mine? I picked you! If it had been up to you, the two of us would never have happened. I found you, I stalked you, and I reeled you in.”
“I wasn’t that big a prize!”
Harry never yelled, and just the surprise of it silenced her.
He pushed himself away from the pergola. “You wanted kids. And I had ‘Daddy’ written all over me. Don’t you get it? For you, it wasn’t about us. It was all about your need to have kids. About me being the father you wanted for them. Someplace in my subconscious I always knew that’s what you were after, but I kept fooling myself. And it was easy to do when there were only Jeremy and Steffie. Even when Brittany came along, I could pretend it was still about us, that you wanted me for me. I might have been able to keep on pretending, but then you got pregnant with Connor, and you walked around with this cat-that-ate-the-canary smile on your face. Everything was about being pregnant and the kids. I tried to swallow it, to keep on pretending I was the great love of your life and not just your best source of sperm, but it got harder. Every morning I’d look at you and want you to love me the way I loved you, but I’d done my job, and you didn’t even see me. And you’re right. I did start shutting down. So I could keep going. But when you got pregnant this time and you were so happy, I couldn’t even go through the motions. I wanted to, but I couldn’t.” His voice broke. “I just… couldn’t.”
Tracy tried to take it in, but so many conflicting emotions were barreling through her that she couldn’t begin to sort them out. Relief. Anger at him for being so obtuse. And joy. Oh, yes, joy, because it wasn’t completely hopeless after all. She didn’t know where to begin, so she decided to start small. “What about the toothpaste?”
He stared at her as if she’d grown a second pregnancy from her forehead. “Toothpaste?”
“The way I don’t always remember to buy toothpaste. And the way it drives you crazy when I lose my keys. You told me if I screwed up the checking account one more time, you were going to take away my checkbook. And do you remember that dent in the fender of your car that you thought happened when you took Jeremy to Little League? I put it there. Connor threw up in my car, and I didn’t have time to clean it up, so I took yours instead, and I was yelling at Brittany in the parking lot at Target and drove my shopping cart into it. What about that, Harry?”
He blinked. “If you’d keep an organized shopping list, you wouldn’t forget to buy toothpaste.”
In typical Harry fashion, he didn’t get it. “I’ll never keep an organized shopping list or stop losing keys or get much better at any of those other things that drive you wild.”
“I know that. I also know there are a thousand men who’d line up for the chance to buy you toothpaste and let you run a shopping cart into their car.”
Maybe he did get it.
Isabel had told her to think with her brain instead of her heart, but that was hard to do when it came to Harry Briggs. “I did know you’d be a great father, and that might have been part of the reason I fell in love with you. But I’d have kept on loving you even if you hadn’t been able to make a single baby. I found all my missing parts with you. I don’t keep wanting to have more babies because you’re not enough for me. I keep wanting them because my love for you gets so big it needs more places to go.”
Hope flickered in his eyes, but he still looked sad. She realized that his insecurities ran even deeper than her own. She’d always regarded him as the most intelligent person she knew, so it was difficult to adjust to the idea that she might be the smarter partner. “It’s true, Harry. Every word.”
“A little hard to believe.” He seemed to be drinking in her face, even though he knew every pore. “Just look at us. I’m the kind of guy you could pass on the street a dozen times and never notice. But you… Men walk into mailboxes when they see you.”
“I never knew a man so hung up on appearance.” She forgot all about thinking with her head and smacked his jaw to get his attention. “I love the way you look. I could stare at you for hours. I used to be married to the most gorgeous man in the galaxy, and we made each other miserable. And you’re right-I could have had any man in the room at that party, but I wasn’t attracted to a single one of them. And when I dumped that drink in your lap, I definitely wasn’t thinking of you as anybody’s father.”
She sensed his spirits begin to lighten, but she wasn’t nearly done. “Someday I’m going to be old, and if you’d seen my grandmother, you’d know there’s a good chance I’ll be ugly as sin by the time I’m eighty. Are you going to stop loving me then? Is appearance all it comes down to with you? Because if it is, we’re in just as much trouble as I thought.”