She blinked quickly, the question making her mouth dry out. “You were hurting.”
“No,” he shook his head. “That’s not it.”
“Why not?”
“Because I didn’t act like I was hurting. I acted—like I was fine.”
“But you weren’t fine.”
“Why do you say that?”
“I recognized what you were feeling. You acted fine, but I saw you as stoic. You had the weight of the world on your shoulders. You were holding it together, but I just knew that behind closed doors, it would crumble apart.”
“How did you know?” he pushed. “How did you see that, and no one else did?”
She appreciated that at least he hadn’t gone all macho and tried to deny it. After all, his father had died. That had to bring with it a world of grief.
“I guess I just recognized the feeling.”
“Because you feel it?”
If he was going to be honest, then she would be, too. “Yes.”
“Losing your mother must have been tough.”
She sipped her prosecco. It was dry and super bubbly, so she savoured the feeling as it travelled through her. “I was very young,” she admitted. “I don’t remember her that well. Just little bits and pieces.”
“Yet you feel it, still.”
Willow expelled a soft breath. “It’s hard to explain,” she murmured.
“Try me.”
When she looked at him, and their eyes met, she felt a rush of emotions that she couldn’t explain. He was looking at her as though understanding how she felt was the most important thing in his life.
“I just…” she tried to find the words, but a streak of compunction held her silent. A feeling that she was being disloyal, when Meredith had probably done her best, made Willow reluctant to say what she truly felt.
“Tell me,” he said, gentle but insistent, and beneath the table, his hand curved over her knee. Sparks fizzed through her entire central nervous system.
“I guess, we have this idea in our minds of what a mum is meant to be like,” she said. “From movies, books, TV. It’s something I’ve always…dreamed of. That closeness.”
“And you wanted it from Meredith?”
“I don’t know if I ever consciously wanted it,” she said, then shook her head, because that wasn’t accurate. “I mean, I wantedher to love me, for us to be close. Genuinely close, like a mother and daughter. Not to replace my mum, but just to…”
“Love you like her own daughter.”
Willow’s throat felt like it was going to close over. She sipped her drink quickly.
“But she didn’t.”
“No.” Willow felt a wave of feeling roll through her – an acknowledgement of failing. Like there was probably something she could have, and should have, done to make this better. To make Meredith love her.
“Then seeing her with the twins must have been hard for you.”
Her stomach fluttered. He had an incredible ability to tap into exactly what she was thinking, to understand it. She lifted her shoulders. “I love my sisters.”
“That’s not what I said.”