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“Not particularly.”
He smiled, despite the sentiment. “Anything I can do to assuage your concerns?”
“I doubt it.”
“Let’s try.” He leaned closer, studying the older woman with identical eyes to Abby’s. “I know how much your support would mean to Abby.”
“Puh-lease,” Winona shook her head. “Don’t sit there so sanctimoniously, acting as ifyouhave my daughter’s interests at heart. Where the hell were you two years ago?”
Well, that escalated quickly. He felt the ground beneath him shift a little. He wasn’t sure what Abby had told Winona about their relationship and didn’t feel it was his place to disclose information that Abby hadn’t wanted to share. “You think I failed her?”
Abigail’s mom made a scoffing sound. “The proof of the pudding’s in the eating. My girl wound up single, alone, raising a child, living on nothing, working her rear end off, while you were building your – what did you call it? Private equity fund?”
He ground his teeth together. “We’ve worked through –,”
“Oh, pish.” She rolled her eyes. Gray, not used to being interrupted, sat very still. “Abby didn’t tell you about Charlotte. You didn’t know about her. I get it. But what about Abby?”
“What about her?”
“Do you have any idea what you did to her?”
He found it almost impossible to breathe, let alone move.
“She wasdevastatedafter you left.” Winona threw a furtive glance towards the restroom door. It remained shut. “If you know my daughter you’ll know that she’s someone who glows from the inside out. Her happiness and joy have always been a palpable force. Then, after you, it was as though all the lights were switched out. She lost so much weight, despite being pregnant, she barely slept, she was destroyed.” Winona leaned closer. “At first, I didn’t understand it. She told me there’d been a one-night stand. I worried it was more sinister, that maybe she’d been raped and didn’t know how to tell me,” Winona shook her head slowly and Gray felt the muscles in his throat bunch together at the very idea of that.
“Angie let it slip, in the end. She didn’t know who the father was, but she knew Abby had been spending a lot of time with a guy. Some ‘high flyer’. She told me that Abby had been wildly in love, had been sure the relationship was leading towards a wedding and happily ever after – everything she’s ever wanted. Angie told me that Abby said she understood she’d never really loved Eric, because it was nothing compared to what she felt for you.”
Winona sat back in her chair, anger humming from her eyes. “As soon as Abby told me that you were the father, I looked you up online. In the last two years, you’ve screwed around, living the high life, while my daughter –,”
His gut rolled. He couldn’t dispute Winona’s accusations. Oh, his exploits were grossly misrepresented on the internet, but it wasn’t his sex life he particularly wanted to address anyway. Besides, what right did he have? In the essentials, Winona was right. He’d left Abby, knowing that she loved him. And when she’d called, and tried to speak to him again, he’d cut her off, because he’d thought it was best for her to have a clean break.
Nothing about this was clean.
A wave of guilt rolled over him.
“And now I see the light’s back on in my daughter. I see her glow when she looks at you, and I’m terrified that you’re going to hurt her again. What if you pull the rug out from under her? I can’t see her suffer like that, Grayson.”
Winona angled her face away, the tension in her features evident. “So, no. I’m not happy about this marriage. Not even a little bit.”
“I don’t intend to hurt her,” he said, honestly, his voice raw. In his peripheral vision, he saw the restroom door open.
“Very few people intend to hurt anyone,” she said quietly, her eyes flitting over the people on the street beyond. “But you’ve proven yourself to be untrustworthy. And I don’t trust you. Not with my daughter.”
It was like a stone being pitched through his body, landing heavily in his gut. He stared at Abby’s mother with a permeating sense of guilt and shame, because none of her accusations could be denied.
Abby returned, before he could respond. “Will you come back to the apartment to see Charlotte after lunch, mom?”
Gray heard it, and he knew Winona did too. ‘the apartment’. Not ‘home’. Abby was bracing for this to disappear, just like Winona was.
The older woman’s eyes collided with Gray’s, a stark warning in their depths.
He hadn’t even made Abby feel welcome enough to think of his place as hers.
But he’d tried. He’d tried to give her everything, and she’d refused. Because she didn’t trust him. Because she didn’t want to trust him. Because she knew he could hurt her again.
Panic surged through Gray, as the situation seemed to be ballooning out of his grip anew. Just like when he’d first dated Abby, and she’d caught him off guard, surprising him with her humor and heart, and that damned light her mother had mentioned. Yes, she’d been different to every woman he’d ever been with and he’d tried to conquer that, he’d tried to get over her by being with her so much the addiction faded, but in the end, he’d known he just had to cut himself off from her. He’d done whatheneeded to do, for his own survival, without thinking about whatsheneeded. What she deserved.
How could he protect her from that again?
