Page 110 of Truly, Madly, Deeply

“Pride goeth before the fall,” she muttered. “So, that’s it? You’re going to go back to the city and go back to not talking? Taking time apart?”

“Pumpkin—”

“You know, I always thought you and Mom had the perfect relationship, the kind I dreamed of having one day. I mean, God, you never even fought.” Her laugh verged on hysterical.

Dad’s face fell.

“No relationship is perfect,” he said.

She scoffed. Tell her something she didn’t know. “I kind of cottoned on to that.” It had only taken her twenty-seven years and change. “Maybe you thought you were protecting me, keeping whatever problems have become oh so insurmountable behind closed doors. Maybe I only saw what you wanted me to see. I don’t know. Maybe I only saw what I wanted.” The specifics were neither here nor there. “But I know you, Dad. And I know you love Mom.” She paused. She’d made a lot of assumptions about her parents, about their relationship. “Don’t you?”

Dad couldn’t have looked more winded than if she’d punched him in the gut. “Truly, I... whether I love your mother has never, ever been a question.”

“Then what?” She crossed her arms, fists pressed snug against her ribs like a hug. “What could be so wrong that you can’t fix it? Please, Dad. Just—just be honest with me.”

Dad, always loud and larger than life, was disquietingly still. He looked small as he slumped against the island, small in a way Truly could never remember him looking before.

“Maybe...” he said. “Maybe love isn’t enough, my dear.”

A scoff bubbled up past her lips. “Bullshit.”

Dad’s eyes widened. “Truly—”

“No.” She shook her head, vehement.

She’d be the first to admit that she’d had her fair share of misconceptions about love.

Her parents’ marriage wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows like she’d once thought.

And perfect relationships? Like unicorns, those didn’t exist.

But love?

Love launched ships and started wars and inspired sonnets and drove people to madness. Love was heaven and hell, sin and redemption. It was as real to her as any other force of nature, hurricanes and earthquakes and lightning storms and meteor strikes. It fascinated her as much as it terrified her as much as it humbled her and—

She’d spent her whole life trying to put it into words, eighty thousand of them at a time.

Love had to be enough.

There was no point if it wasn’t.

“Truly, sweetheart,” Dad implored. “I do believe your heart was—is in the right place. And I think, deep down, your mother knows it, too. And that boy of yours? He’s right. You, my lionhearted daughter, are brilliant and bold and have the biggest heart of anyone I’ve ever had the pleasure of knowing. And if I had even the smallest hand in that? My life’s work is done.”

Truly blinked back tears.

Dad reached out and set his hand on her shoulder. Truly let him. “That boy outside, he’s a bright fellow. And it’s plain to see he loves you. I don’t know how anyone who knows you couldn’t.”

Her scoff came out wet and weak. She dragged her wrist under her eyes, mopping up stubborn tears that clung to her lashes and had yet to fall. “Don’t be ridiculous. We’ve known each other a couple months. He doesn’t love me.”

“Sometimes that’s all it takes,” he said. “And before you ask me how I know... that boy outside?” Dad exhaled shakily and tilted his head back, staring up at the ceiling and blinking hard. “He looks at you the way I look at your mother. It takes a sap to know one, Truly. And Colin? Maybe he doesn’t even know it yet, but he is gone on you. Hook, line, and sinker. Call it a father’s intuition, but I bet my bottom dollar he tells you inside a month. And Truly, my dearest, darlingest daughter? I look forward to the day I get to tell you I told you so.”

Truly pinched her eyes shut and pressed her wrist against her lips, stifling a sob. She sucked in a greedy breath, air rasping past her lips. “So what? Say he does. What’s the point? If you and Mom can’t make it work...”

Her bottom lip wobbled. She bit down hard, staying it and the tears that threatened to spill over.

“You shine so bright, Broadway Baby,” he said, and she had to stifle a sob at his use of her childhood nickname. “Your mother and I... I don’t know when, but somewhere along the way, the two of us... we lost the plot. But don’t let anyone, least of all us, dim your light.”

“You lost the plot, Daddy?” She glared at him through a haze of tears. “Go find it.”

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