When Hal thought about it hard enough, he could vaguely remember a time when he'd felt loved. It went without saying that his parents had obviously loved him, although he could never be quite sure when it came to his mother, since he had few memories of her. His father had loved him, of course, but often neglected him in favor of his work. The man had been a raging workaholic, and the obsession had done little for he and his son's relationship. Hal had heard him say the word "love" in reference to him maybe two or three times before his death.
Hal guessed that Julie had loved him on some sort of selfish, narcissistic level. He could never hold a grudge against the woman though. In the end, all his step-mother had wanted was to feel loved by someone, and she took it the only way she knew how. Hal could relate to the feeling too much to be angry with the poor woman. After all, he knew exactly how she felt.
Although he had never truly acknowledged it, Hal knew he had been loved by Emma. He knew this, and yet it did little to comfort him. What Emma had felt was a sort of longing admiration toward him to fill the void left by her mother's neglect and her stepfather's indifference. In the end, it had done little good for either of them, and it was a kind of love that Hal really didn't care to experience more than once.
When he had been working as an engineer on Shadow Moses Island, Hal had hoped, had prayed, that maybe Sniper Wolf had loved him. That maybe her gruff acknowledgement of his presence, and the occasional conversation he had with her here and there, wasn't just some sort of pitiful recognition. That maybe she felt some sort of slight emotion towards him as he had for her. It was, of course, naïve and childish of him to think such a thing, and he felt stupid even now when he looked back on it. Partially because of the fact that his feelings had been so childish, and partially because the relationship reminded him eerily of the one that Emma had shared with him.
When Dave came along, Hal had never thought the man could or would ever grow to love him. He'd never even considered it. Their relationship had began on a purely professional level, and Hal wasn't quite naïve enough to think it would become anything else. But for all his schooling and all his degrees, and for all the knowledge he had stored away in his head, Hal had been completely and utterly wrong. Whether it was in the cup of coffee he'd sometimes find waiting at his desk in the morning, or in the soft way Dave would sometimes call his name, or even in the way he would look at him out of the corner of his eye when he thought he wasn't looking, Hal knew he was loved. And out of all the loves he knew, or thought, he had experienced, this one was the most pure and concrete one he had ever come to know.