How can everything that comes out of Neal's mouth still piss her off like this? He "would have never gone near her"? He and August...they let it all happen to her—getting caught, going to jail, giving up Henry... Outside the bar, she walks backwards until her back hits the bricks that face the alley, her hands sliding up into her hair. Her parents are Snow White and Prince Charming, the man she loved—Henry's father—was from there, the whole time, and if he had told her, would she have believed him?
Yes, something in her echoes again and again. Yes. She was seventeen; she had fawned all over him, hung on his every word. They were together too often for him to be crazy or an addict without her noticing. She had loved him! Even if she hadn't believed him at first, she would have tried. She would have listened.
He'd been trying to help her? How? How did going to jail get her to her family? Going to jail had cost her her family, the baby boy whose cries she had heard but had never even looked at.
Calm down, she heaves, letting her arms fall to her sides. He didn't know you were pregnant. You didn't know you were pregnant. If he had...
No. No, that does not make it okay! He was supposed to love her! He was supposed to...to...choose her, put her first. So what if August told him he was Baelfire? So what? What if they had gone to Storybrooke then, together? It's hard to imagine having a team for breaking curses and fighting dragons and all of that, but if he'd wanted her to find her family, why didn't he take her to them? And he went and blamed it all on fate. There's no such thing. People just do things. They either fight or run away, and he'd run away. From her. Like everyone else, from here or the Enchanted Forest.
She'll tell Gold she couldn't find him, as he had told her to. Maybe that's what Gold deserves, and Henry? Henry doesn't deserve a dad who doesn't choose to stay when things get crazy. They can't know. It just has to be that way.
You never have to see me again. She hates herself for the very idea of that bringing tears to her eyes, but the way he'd looked at her...one brief flash of recognition, and then a second of joy...and then horror, and she knows he will never look at her the way her parents looked at her-like she was the most precious thing in the world-again.
A/N: What a low blow. All of it. I like Michael Raymond James' performance as Neal because he knew exactly who this guy was. He laughs when Emma confronts him about abandoning her, the things he says to her, the way they are said... Let's just hope Mary Margaret and David are having a better time in Storybrooke and there isn't any crisis going on there, too! Coming up? A look at Emma and Neal's relationship in flashback.