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Finally, when he closed the folder, he said, “My mom has an insurance settlement she’s never touched. You don’t have to buy her out. She could give Healthy Food to you.”
“There are tax implications involved in a gift of that size.” Despite Vivian’s protestations, Susan had investigated the possibility of gifting Healthy Food. Susan had been willing to jump through the hoops needed to make it happen. Vivian wasn’t.
Karl sipped his coffee. Then he took another cookie. He had a preference for the strawberry ones.
“I don’t want to be given this,” Vivian insisted. “I want to earn it. I want to work for it.”
“Some of these scenarios involve substantial amounts of help from me.” He retreated deeper into the cold, businesslike Karl she remembered from the first night in his apartment. The one who approached every decision as though it was a problem to be solved. Once again, she was a problem.
She took a cookie. “I’m not foolish enough to believe I can do this on my own. Just that I want to work for it. And help is different than a gift.” He’d said similar words after the first disastrous meeting with his family—that a helping hand was different than a rescue. She finally understood what he’d meant.
“I have an insurance settlement that could buy Healthy Food.”
She bit into her cookie and chewed, hoping the action would sooth her irritations. She could love his stony face, but being offered money when she’d just said she wanted to earn something was worse than being a surprise problem in his apartment. This was more like waking up in a hotel room finding out she’d drunkenly married a stranger. She wasn’t just a problem to be solved; she was a problem to throw money at.
“I don’t want a gift from you or your mother.”
“We’re married, so it wouldn’t be a gift. We would be buying my mother out together.”
She loved this man. Of that fact, Vivian had no doubt. She loved his steadfastness, his devotion to his family and his sense of duty. What she didn’t love was when he was all of those things without the warmth of emotion to soften them. She spent the time chewing her second bite of cookie remembering that she had benefited from his problem solving and so could have patience with the stony face.
“This isn’t about our relationship. This is about me and a future for Healthy Food.”
“How are those not things about our relationship?” His voice had the cold edge of anger, which she hadn’t expected. “We’re married. I want us to stay married, and not just for the sake of the baby. I want you living in my apartment, sleeping in my bed. How is that not about you?”
“You know my terms on that.” There was that ugly word again.
Karl picked the folder up and shook it at her. “Is our relationship as quantifiable as this?”
Vivian opened her mouth to argue, but she was the one who’d used the word terms to begin with. “I don’t want to move in with you as part of a plan for Healthy Food. I don’t want our relationship to be based on practicality.”
“What part of ‘want’ is unclear?”
All the parts of it that didn’t sound like “I love you.”
“And a relationship based on practicality didn’t stop you from appearing in my apartment lobby asking for health insurance and a place to live.” She watched his eyes as he said the words, but even in his anger they lacked fire. “Both of which I gave you with hardly any questions.”
And there, right there, was the biggest reason why it was foolish for her to want to sleep in his bed and wake up next to him every morning. So long as he still thought about how she had been fired and how desperate she’d been every time he saw her, she would be less of a person in his eyes. Any desire to sleep with her didn’t change the fact that he couldn’t truly love her so long as he thought so little of her.
“I was a different person then, and willing to settle.” She nodded toward the folder. “But now I know that I want the husband, the child, the career, the family. Maybe it’s not possible, but I’m not going to settle for less.”
Karl tapped his fingers on the folder, and for the first time in their relationship he was speechless. Not silent—he was often silent—but completely lacking in speech. He opened his mouth to say something, then shut it. Completely stunned and gaping like a fish. What had she said that she hadn’t said a million times before, in each of their previous arguments? If their conversations about her moving back in were a broken record, the player was broken now, too.
