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The growing awareness that Maxwell was starting to feel a way about his children’s nanny that he thought he would never feel again was beginning to drive him up a wall. He didn’t even know how to begin to consider that maybe, just maybe, he was falling in love with Miss Fine.
How could I have done that? He wondered. He hadn’t kissed anyone since he last kissed…
He didn’t want to think about that.
Maxwell couldn’t erase it all from his mind. It felt as though his heart took control and he just leaned in and kissed her. It was the look on Miss Fine’s face after he pulled away from her that he couldn’t stop thinking about. It wasn’t only a look of shock, there was something deeper to it, though he knew it at least included shock. How could she have guessed he would do that? Usually a ‘thank you’ from Max was just that; words. Never a kiss. However, Miss Fine looked like she was trying to figure something out. Maybe she was trying to understand where he was coming from with the kiss.
Honestly? He was just as lost as she must have been. Could he really be falling in love with her?
Love.
That’s always been a sore subject for Maxwell, and it only became more and more sore as the years went on.
Conceptually, Max understood what love was ever since he was a kid. He knew that it was caring for someone deeply, always wanting to be by their side no matter what, and always supporting them. He constantly saw it all around him. Every time his nanny took him out to the park for a walk he would see kids wandering around, playing games with their parents and their siblings. He remembered seeing a little boy stumbling and falling once, skinning his knee and running to his parents for hugs and comfort. That was love; he was certain of it, and it made him feel awful.
Those memories made Maxwell think of the time when he was crying because he skinned his knee running around the garden, and his mother didn’t even give him the time of day. His father told him to toughen up. He was just sent to his nanny to have her ‘deal with it,’ as his father said.
He remembered always holding out hope that maybe, someday, his parents would prove to him that they loved him just the same as other parents did their children.
All of that hope drained out of him when he was sent to boarding school.
It just felt so empty. Max didn’t understand why his parents would want to send him away. Especially at that age, he couldn’t process it at all. He always heard in the children’s books that he read that families loved each other. Why didn’t anyone in his family love him?
Throughout the rest of his childhood, he only had Nigel and Jocelyn, his siblings. Even then, things were never exactly right between everyone. Maybe it was how messed up their relationships with their parents were, but they could never seem to have completely normal relationships with one another. Max beat himself up about it quite a bit. What kind of an older brother, especially to children whose parents couldn’t care less about them, was he?
He left England as soon as he could. There was nothing for him there but his family, so he felt he wasn’t leaving much behind when he decided to start over in America. Of course, he had Niles by his side; he was the only person he grew up with that seemed to enjoy his company. He wasn’t just going to leave him.
It was a few years after that, when his business gained some stability with the help of his new business partner, C.C., that he met Sara.
There was something about Sara that Maxwell found comforting and familiar, yet so different than anyone he had ever known before. She made him feel a way he never felt in his life. Every time he laid eyes on her, he felt it deep in his chest. It was warm and safe; it was love. He knew it.
That was the feeling that he always read in novels and saw in films.
It was so much more than he expected. Much more intense and so much deeper than any talk of love could have prepared him for. It was as though all of the love he had built up in him over the course of his empty life existed just for him to share it with Sara.
Of course, she was the woman he married. He had three beautiful children with her.
Maxwell’s life was complete. It felt as though the void in his heart from his childhood was full. He had his family and he could avoid all of the mistakes that his parents made with him. His children were going to know what love was, and not just from observations made in the park and in books. Everything was just how he dreamed it would always be.
Then, all of a sudden, it wasn’t.
Sara’s death hit him harder than anything he had experienced in his life. He had to hold it together for the children; he couldn’t let them know that it felt as though his heart had been ripped out of his chest and he had to watch it shatter into millions of pieces right in front of him. Losing their mother was hard enough, he didn’t want them to think they were losing him too.
But the unfortunate reality was that they were.
Everything was falling apart. He tried not to, but he shut down. The kids could tell. Their father was not the same person he had always been.
Sara was the first person that ever loved him. That fact rattled around his head every day for years. He had to remember that now he had the kids, and they loved him too, but as the years went on, he could feel it fading.
Max found himself in the cycle of hiring nannies to deal with the children; oh God, deal with? He felt like he was becoming his father. He hated that. He hated himself at that point.
He didn’t want that to happen. Max wanted his kids to be happy. He wanted their hearts to be full. He made so many attempts to make sure his children knew how much he loved them, but it felt like nothing he was doing was working, so he sunk himself into his work. Eventually, it started becoming his priority, and he hated himself for that too. He just couldn’t seem to do anything about it. Nothing he tried could bring him closer to the kids.
So he partly stopped trying.
That was months ago, when Miss Fine showed up at his door through what felt like some sort of a miracle. She made all of the pushes that Maxwell needed to make sure his family could feel complete, even without Sara.
Things were different for him after that. He loved seeing the children smile again. They actually wanted him to be around. All because Miss Fine was making sure they knew that they were a family. Max needed that more than anything else. He felt loved.
Maxwell also felt something else. That same feeling that he felt in his chest whenever he looked at Sara; he felt it when he looked at Miss Fine. Only this time, it felt more terrifying than it did safe.
On Christmas, when it felt too impersonal to just give her money and he gave her a vase instead simply because it reminded him of her, it started to hit him that maybe he had feelings for her, but he couldn’t even bear the thought. It made him feel overwhelmed with guilt. Maxwell knew that Sara would want him to move on, but he just couldn’t do that to her.
Yet, he still found himself waiting up for Miss Fine when she went on that date that he set her up on as a part of a business deal. When Niles asked him if he was scared she would have a bad time or a good one, he didn’t even know what to think. He always found himself uneasy whenever she even mentioned other men.
When Miss Fine told him she loved him at the hospital, it was like he felt his heart stop. On the surface, he tried to convince himself it was out of fear of having to let her down, but when she came out of surgery and it turned out she was just saying it to everyone, he felt an ache. Almost like he was hoping she meant it.
It was thinking about earlier that day that seemed to spell it out the most clearly to Maxwell. The critic was insulting Miss Fine, so to defend her, Max put the sake of his show on the line. His work was always what he put first in his life, aside from the children and Sara.
He put Miss Fine before his own work. That meant something.
It meant that he knew exactly why he felt the same way when he looked at Miss Fine that he felt when looked at Sara.
He didn’t even want to admit it to himself. The thought made him feel so guilty, and above all now, he just felt scared. When he kissed her earlier, it gave him a sense of some clarity momentarily. That feeling, the one he had been ruminating about in his mind all night from the moment his lips touched hers, was dangerous. So dangerous, he didn’t even want to put a name to it.
If he ever could admit to his feelings, it would mean putting his entire heart in the hands of someone else again. Someone else that could take it with them and shatter it as they leave him behind.
So, for the foreseeable future, Maxwell wasn’t going to pay any of it much mind; at least until he could figure out if love would be worth the pain he felt it inevitably came with.