Walking on Broken Glass - Christa Allan [125]
He looked confused instead of relieved. “What does this have to do with my parents?”
Where are you, God?
“Nothing.” Confusion must be contagious. I wanted to be angry with him. I’d ripped my heart out and handed it to him, and he’d tossed it away like a child who plays with the wrappings instead of the gifts. Maybe I spoke too early, but it was too late to be careful with my words now. I tried again. “This is about us. Before tonight, I didn’t think we could save this relationship. Maybe this is a chance.”
“I don’t know anymore,” he said. “I feel like I don’t know you, my parents, myself. I feel like you’ve expected me to change along with you. Not like you’ve given me a list, but I almost wished you had. I thought if you fell in love with me back then, you could fall in love with me now. I thought you’d still love the Carl you married.”
The clarity of seeing myself in Carl broke me open, just like God's grace had intended. It struck the fault lines in my life. But I didn’t shatter. God used my weakness for His strength. Perhaps those shattered pieces could begin to fill the spaces between us.
“The Carl I married and the Leah you married no longer exist—at least not in the ways we expected. That doesn’t mean love is impossible,” I said.
Silence.
Carl stared at me as he did that day at the airport, curious, knowing, and yet not. “I don’t know. I’m overwhelmed. I don’t know myself or what I want. For so long, my parents steered my life, and I trusted them. Now the people I love aren’t who I expected them to be. I don’t know if I can be the husband you need. I don’t know if I can love the person you’re becoming.”
I hadn’t been able to predict that his parents were going to betray him because I couldn’t see past my own hurt—past how they felt about me. The winds carried me back to a grocery store. Apple juice. A sense of being outside of myself to see above the fog.
“If I’d known who I was, I wouldn’t have needed the time away to get well. You gave that to me.” Carl shifted in the chair. “Okay, maybe not so willingly. But you were still here when I came home, so you didn’t give up on me—on us. We don’t need to solve everything tonight.”
He covered my hands with his own. “I’ve always loved your intensity. At times I admired it. Sometimes it frightened me.” He sighed. “But there's just so much pain between us.”
“What are you saying?” The tug in my heart suspected the answer, but I needed to hear it from him.
He stood up and walked around the table, lowered himself on his heels, and placed his hands on my knees.
“I need to spend another month on the job I started. Or, I guess I should say the one my parents started. So, that's what I’ll do—stay one more month. By then, their part of the sale should be finalized. The office should be finished.”
He stood and drew me up toward him. “I need time, Leah. Time to catch up with you. Time to learn who I am. Time to learn who I can be.”
I had memorized his face so many times in anger; I couldn’t remember the last time I looked at him with love. I cradled his face in my hands. My fingertips brushed his forehead. What would become of us? Could forgiveness be enough?
“One month. You waited for me. Now it's my turn to wait for you.”
Discussion Questions
1. Molly puts her friendship with Leah on the line when she confronts her about drinking, and though Molly didn’t know it until later, Leah was ready to hear the truth. If you have friends involved in behaviors, either addictive or questionable, are you hesitant to approach them? What prevents you from having this discussion with them? If you’ve had a discussion with a friend, like Molly with Leah, how did that turn out? What difference did it make, if any, in your friendship?
2. Sometimes, like Leah, we believe we’re keeping our image under control. And sometimes,