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She hugged him. ‘I reckon he knows. He’s watching you right now, huffing about how his boy’s gone soft in the head and of course he loves you. But then he’d add there was still time for you to do another degree and maybe specialise in science law.’
Brad was shaking.
Oh, dear God. She’d just sent him into another meltdown. ‘Brad, it’s OK,’ she said, desperately wanting to reassure him.
But when he pulled back, she could see that he was laughing.
‘What?’ she asked, puzzled.
‘What you just said... That’s exactly what he would have said.’
‘So I’m right about the rest of it, too.’
‘I guess.’
‘I loved your dad. I thought he might be a bit of a nightmare to live with—so full-on hearty, the whole time, it must have been a bit wearing—but I never realised he gave you such a hard time about your studies. I wish you’d told me. I could’ve...’ She sighed. ‘Maybe not.’
‘Made it better? I think I needed to grow up and see it for myself,’ he said. ‘Which, thanks to you, I have, and I’m sorry I didn’t trust you enough to tell you years ago.’
‘Is that why you asked me to elope? So you’d be living with me instead of having to come back here and be nagged about your degree?’
He shook his head. ‘It was a fit of rebellion. We had a big fight, that night. And it wasn’t just the usual stuff about my career; he started on about you. He said we were too young even to be engaged. And I wanted to prove him wrong.’
She bit her lip. ‘So you didn’t actually want to marry me.’
‘I always wanted to marry you,’ he said. ‘Dad was wrong about some of it—I never met anyone who even began to match up to how I felt about you—but he was right about us being too young to get married. I still had a lot of growing up to do. The fact I pushed you into eloping instead of having a wedding like Ruby’s was proof of that.’
‘I really thought you loved me. And when your solicitor sent me that letter...’ Her throat felt as if it had closed up.
‘More proof that I needed to grow up,’ he said. ‘I really loved you, Abby. But I was a mess and I really thought setting you free to find happiness with someone else was the right thing to do.’
‘I never wanted anyone else.’ She swallowed hard. ‘I think you broke me for a while. I cried so much I couldn’t see, my eyes were so swollen. And you wouldn’t even speak to me.’
He held her close. ‘I’m so sorry I hurt you. I’m not going to ask you to forgive me, because I can’t ask for that. But I’ve learnt a lot about myself over the last few weeks and I know I’d react differently in the future.’
The future. The thing they were meant to be discussing tomorrow.
Did they have a future?
‘I felt as if I wasn’t enough for you,’ she said. ‘And it made me wary of dating again. In case whoever I started seeing felt like that about me—that I wasn’t enough.’
‘Any man who had you in his life would count himself the luckiest man in the world.’
‘You didn’t,’ she pointed out.
‘Because I was young, I was hurting, and I was very, very stupid.’ He stroked her hair. ‘I can’t change the past, Abby. I wish I could. And, if I could, I would never...’
‘...have married me?’ she finished.
‘Have let you go,’ he corrected.
‘So are you saying you want to try again?’
‘I’m saying,’ he said carefully, ‘we might both need a bit more time to think. We’ve told each other things we maybe weren’t expecting to hear.’
She certainly hadn’t had a clue about what he’d told her.
‘We need to make the right decision for both of us,’ he said, ‘for the right reasons. And at this precise moment I feel as if someone’s just put me on one of those loop-the-loop rollercoasters at triple speed.’
‘So you want to go back to the Bay Tree on your own?’
‘No. I want to walk through this garden with you, hand in hand,’ he said.
Now she got it. ‘And not talk.’
