“That’s enough, Tara. I know you want someone to blame and I know you’d love it to be my father, the man you blame for our breakup, the man you despise, but it’s not true.”
“You wouldn’t believe it if he signed a confession.”
“My father wouldn’t lie. You want the truth, but only if it’s ugly. You want to justify your hatred of this town and everyone in it. You accused Bill Fallon, Greg Pescatore, Joseph, now my father. Who’s next? Your mother? Me? Why not me? Wharton caused my father trouble. Maybe I put the faulty unit in his car. Maybe I drove him off the highway. Why not?”
She’d never seen him so angry before. “You’re exaggerating to make my position look ridiculous.”
“I don’t need to exaggerate. You have a chip on your shoulder the size of this town. You’re angry at me because I stayed, because I helped my father.”
“Your father bullied you, manipulated you. He robbed you of college, dragged you into his company and kept you here to keep him from self-destructing again. You fell for it, you’re still falling for it, because you think if you don’t do what he wants he won’t love you anymore. Parents are supposed to love you, no matter what. You don’t have to earn their love.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said, but she could tell that her words had struck a nerve. “How could you?”
“You mean with my parents, who don’t love me? No, you mean because I don’t know how to love. I’m not capable of love.”
“That’s not what I said.”
“It’s what you think, though.”
“No. It’s what you think, Tara. And you use that as an excuse to keep people at arm’s length, to reject them before they reject you. You had no right to make me choose. I loved my father and I loved you. He needed me more.”
“Don’t you get it? He’ll always need you more.” She felt so lost suddenly, so sad. It seemed hopeless. They were both trapped in their past.
“My father is flawed. I know that. His bitterness tore our family apart, okay? But he’s still my father. I love him and he loves me. I work around his flaws. I focus on the good. That’s what you do for the people you love. You don’t set impossible standards, then write them off when they can’t meet them.”
“That’s what you think I do, isn’t it? I write people off.”
“I could never make you happy, Tara. You know that. You’d always be braced for me to fail you. I can’t live like that, constantly having to prove my love, always about to lose you.”
“And I can’t live with someone who thinks that of me, who has so little respect or trust.”
“Exactly,” he said. He felt the same about her. They were stuck.
They looked at each other in silence for a long time as their words settled around them like dry leaves after a gust. Her fingers and toes felt numb, her chest hollow, her brain fuzzy.
It was over. In a way it was a relief. They’d ended it before they could hurt each other more than either of them could bear.
“What do we do now?” Dylan asked softly, his eyes so sad she wanted to cup his cheek, tell him never mind, she’d be the love he needed her to be and he’d be hers. But that wasn’t possible.
She looked out across the parking lot, then back at the front of the building. “We go back to work,” she said, fighting with everything in her to do the sensible thing, to do what she’d promised herself and her sister she would do. “Can we do that? Or is that over, too?”
“My father did not put that part in your father’s car. We don’t even know if the part caused the accident. That’s all speculation, Tara.”
She let his words sink in, as painful as that was. “You’re right. It could have been a tech at Wharton who put it in,” she said softly. “Tony mentioned that, too.” She herself had seen batteries being installed in the testing area. “I did assume the worst.”
Dylan blew out a breath. “So let’s find out who did the installation and whether or not the part was faulty.”
“For that, I have to get the insurance company to release the car so we can have the part tested.”
“If we can find the serial number in any of the Tesla photos I took,