A/N: I was really feeling some angst, so I put it on the page. But don't worry — once we get some perspective, there's a HEA :)

The song lyrics for the title chapters headings is I and Love and You by The Avett Brothers

One foot in and one foot back

But it don't pay to live like that

So I cut the ties and I jumped the tracks

For never to return

As he took a swig of his scotch, Charles stared at the wall in front of him. Was it his third? Fourth? He couldn't be sure. He'd been sitting in the same spot for hours, with the exception of refilling his glass.

It had become his nightly ritual, though alcohol was optional. He would come home from work, take care of the girls and get them to bed, then sit on his couch and stare at the wall. Or out the window. Or at the ceiling. Or at the unread manuscripts that had started to pile up.

He always had a drink with him — sometimes his preferred dark liquors, sometimes a cup of coffee, and sometimes even a coke. He knew cokes were terrible for him, and he rarely let Nicole and Bianca indulge, but he needed an alcohol alternative that could make him feel something.

He had never felt like this. He had searched his memory and come up with nothing that had made him feel so heavy and numb and physically ill. When his father had died, he had deeply felt every emotion that flooded his body. Pain and anguish over his loss. Joy and comfort from the wonderful memories they had shared. Anxiety and regret over things unsaid. He almost felt like he was drowning in his emotions as they came like steady waves to overwhelm him, one right after another.

But he felt something. He managed that grief. That ache never really went away, instead taking up residence within a small part of him that he co-existed with. That grief was symbiotic.

This grief was parasitic, feeding on all of his emotions until he was torpefied, a hollow shell of a human that just went through the motions of existence.

It was easier, he reasoned, to feel nothing. The alternative was wearing his heart on his sleeve, bearing his newly opened wound for the world to see. He decided the moment she said no he would never expose himself that way again.

His marriage to Pauline and its dissolution had left him with a few scars and a lot of trust issues. It took time for those scars to heal, but they did. Learning to trust again was a little harder, but it seemed to be going well.

Until her.

Until Liza.

When they first met, she was an enigma; he was so intrigued by her. He couldn't help being drawn to her and her, what he thought at the time, old soul. He chided himself for weeks — months — for starting to fall for an assistant 15 years his junior. He was not that kind of man and did not want to be that kind of boss. It was almost torturous, the spark and connection they shared, without being able to make anything of it.

So many almosts and "what ifs" between them. And just when he thought he had it figured out, Edward L.L. Moore exposed her secret. He felt like his trust had been shattered.

Repairing that damage was harder than his entire ordeal with Pauline. As difficult as that had been, once he came to terms with it, he adapted and soldiered on.

But that lie...the rug had been pulled from under him. He thought he was finally on solid ground. Two steps forward, one step back.

What surprised him was how much he still loved her, despite it all. He had never seen her so distressed. He initially thought it might be because he had caught her; the jig was up. She didn't want to lose her job and that meant mending bridges with him.

Then he thought maybe she was trying to protect Kelsey and Diana from being implicated in her scheme. They were long-time employees and might be at risk if word got out.

But even as he distanced himself from her, he kept feeling tugs trying to pull him back into her orbit.

Then he had seen her at the Christmas party with her daughter, and that's when the reality of it all hit him full in the face; the depth and breadth of what she had done. How utterly devoted she was to her daughter and how brave she was to take such a risk.

That's when he realized just how deeply in love with her he was, and how little he cared about her lie.

He knew there would be complications, but he knew they could navigate the tricky waters together. It wasn't easy, but they had made it, hadn't they? They had taken the hero's journey and emerged victorious.

Or that's what he had thought. He had, apparently, wrongly assumed their story was a comedy of errors, when really it was a tragedy.

He drained the last of his scotch, allowing the burn of it to bring him out of his nightly daze. He decided against another, so he washed the glass and returned it to its place before he made his way to his bedroom.

It was still hard, sometimes, to be in this room. The memory of place they had first come together seared permanently into his brain. The place where he felt, for the first time in a long time, things would be okay.

When the feelings started to bubble up, he would shut the door and retreat to the guest room. He didn't sleep well, but at least, more often than not, he could get some sleep in there. And managing several hours of sleep was crucial to not looking as terrible as he felt — or wouldn't feel, rather.

He wanted to understand. He would compromise, despite what he had said. He would keep bending until he broke if it meant he could have her, that they could have a life together. He would even grovel at her feet if it meant they would be together. But first, he wanted to understand.

He thought they were on the same page. He thought they wanted the same things. He thought they shared the same goals. He thought they were in it together.

What had he missed? What had gone wrong?

Was she still that spooked from her previous marriage? Was she afraid of what their life would look like? Was she afraid of leaving Maggie and Brooklyn and not going back?

All of these fears he felt he could've assuaged if she would've talked to him — if she had given him some kind of explanation that made more sense.

The Liza he knew — or thought he knew — wasn't afraid of commitment and stability. She wasn't afraid to speak her mind and let her needs be known. She wanted security. She wanted to share her life with someone because she had so much to offer and so much love to give.

So what happened?

This was the question that had burrowed itself into his brain and played on repeat 24 hours a day. He only managed to quiet it when he busied himself with so much work it was impossible to multitask.

But that only lasted so long. There was only so much work. And she was always there. She couldn't not be.

He was grateful they were both mature enough to maintain a professional working relationship, but that didn't mean he wasn't agonized every time he saw her laughing with Kelsey at the coffee bar. Or when her desk was in his line of sight, and he could see her intensely focused on whatever she was doing. Especially when she wore her glasses.

The damn glasses. The glasses she had worn when he had cooked for her. When he really started thinking about how they could actually build a life together.

What had he missed?

After it happened, he had thought about the course of their relationship over and over again, trying to find some hint of what was to come. But he continually came up empty.

When he remembered that Josh had proposed to her, it had made him go cold. He didn't remember if she had wanted to say yes. But they had broken up and stayed that way, despite several attempts on his end to try again.

He hated to think that their tryst in the Hamptons had played a part in that breakup. But that meant something, didn't it? That she and Josh broke things off and she didn't try to get back together.

And now, for him, she was trying. Or she had tried.

She had before, hadn't she? After he kissed her in the Paramus Mall. And when she didn't meet him for drinks. And after they'd kissed at Pound Ridge. There were so many times she had tried to make things right between them, and do things the right way. That had to mean something.

Yet here he was.

He wished it was something as simple as her not wanting wanting to be a stepmother. He knew they both didn't want more children, but he knew she loved his girls just as much as they loved her. He had hoped to introduce them to Caitlin and welcome her into the mix; he knew how much they would love having a big sister. Though he didn't know Caitlin as well as Liza knew his girls, from what he did know and had seen, she would be more than up to the task.

He wished he could find some fatal flaw that would make it easier not to love her. But he loved every part of her, even the imperfect parts, and none of them were deal breakers.

He just wanted to understand.

He glanced at the clock on the nightstand.

3:41 AM.

He groaned, doing calculations in his head for how late he could sleep before he was late for work. He sent up a silent prayer of gratitude for the school's carpool and his daughter's becoming self-sufficient enough to have their own morning routine, with or without him. It pricked his heart a little to think about how grown up they were becoming. He made a mental note to have a Disney Princess marathon with them soon.

He tried to settle in, fiddling with his phone to set his late morning alarms. He was about to set it back on the nightstand when he noticed a little red bubble on his messages app.

Curiosity piqued — who on earth could've sent him a message at 4 AM — he tapped his screen.

I know it's late, and I'm sorry to ask this of you again. But can we talk?

Liza.