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What I did know was that I cared what Morrigan thought of me. And, even though she’d let me marry someone else, that didn’t hurt me enough to ever force her to stay away.
“I think that you’re entitled to your opinions of me,” I hedged.
Morrigan started to reel, her brows pinching in concentration.
She took so long to say anything, I’d thought the subject had been dropped.
But, as she reeled, she finally turned to look at me.
And what I saw there made my stomach ache.
“I didn’t want you to be beholden to take care of me,” she finally said. “I’m okay being alone. I don’t want to have to force anyone to stay when they deserve something way better than what they’d get when it came to me.”
I felt my stomach clench. “Wouldn’t that have been my choice, though?”
She stopped reeling and the rod damn near bent in half as whatever fish we had on the line sensed freedom.
“Wouldn’t it have been my choice on whether we broke up or not in the first place?” she asked. “Shouldn’t it have been my choice on whether to go or not?”
I looked away.
But it didn’t matter.
All I could see was the anger in her brown eyes.
They’d always been captivating.
Swirling swaths of brown caramel and whiskey, they made my heart physically ache.
“You wouldn’t have gone,” I finally settled on.
“I wouldn’t have,” she agreed.
I still remembered that day like it was yesterday. The day that my life changed forever, because I’d made it change.
Our separation had been amicable, but it’d been heartbreaking at the same time.
I’d thought we’d both settled on the choice, but maybe she’d agreed because she knew that I wouldn’t take no for an answer…
• • •
“I want you to go to school.”
She looked at me, her beautiful brown eyes, my brown-eyed girl, with such hope, that it made my heart physically ache.
“I want to stay with you,” she countered.
“No, you don’t,” I said. “Don’t you want to become a doctor? Be able to help all those people that need you? You can’t do that here. You won’t be who you want to be by staying in Accident. And, baby, it’s not forever. If you get to thirty, and you have that doctorate in your hand, and you want to still be with me, I’m here. For you. I’m always here. And I’ll be going away to school, too. So I won’t be here moping and crying, waiting for you to come back.”
“I…” she trailed off. “Is that what you want?”
I could see the moment she decided to give in. The moment that she knew that I wanted this for her, even if she hadn’t wanted it enough for herself.
“Do you really want to go to school?” she asked, sounding tired.
“I need to find something to do with my life,” I said. “I can’t just be a deckhand, or a fish cleaner, forever.”
She looked at her fingernails. She was a nail-biter, I could tell that she wanted to bring that left pointer finger to her mouth and nibble away.
