Alice?Maybe wrote:
I get the feeling, because it's what I want?, that Abby cares more for Owen than she ever did for Thomas. I have nothing I can point to exactly in support of this feeling.
The movie doesn't give us much to go on, one way or another. They apparently met when Thomas was twelve; Thomas went on to become an "older" boy, a teenager, a young man, a young man in his prime, a not so young man until he turned into what we saw. He was never able to stay in one place in lots of ways, where Abby had no choice but to stay put.
What we saw in the movie was how this process
ended for these two people. One piece of evidence offered for their first days or weeks together are the expressions on their faces in the photo strip where Abby doesn't really look all that happy. Another is where Abby barges into the bedroom in order to practise her newfound Morse code skills, and Thomas is seen venerating that very same photo strip (if memory serves). For some reason, that 'veneration' speaks more loudly to me than Abby's "not really happy" expression in those photos - maybe Abby just wasn't happy about having her picture taken. For Thomas, at least, it seems those photos bring back very pleasant memories.
There's a thread somewhere on this board that hotly debates just how differently Abby might have seen Thomas while he was still twelve from how she now sees Owen at the same age. I don't remember any good keywords to search on, so I'll have to do some wading to locate it again - pester me and I'll (eventually) dig it up.
I suppose a lot of it depends on what you
want to see, but Grumpy Old Man Sauvin doesn't see anything to firmly support the argument that anything would necessarily be any different. There's nothing to preclude the possibility that there'd been men like Thomas in Abby's life before, and with Owen now coming into her life, there's the really squicky feeling there'll be such a man again. I call these "Thomas Cycles" (tm); if they'd occurred more than a couple of times, part of Abby's depressed resignation and apparent general aloofness towards Grumpier Old Man Thomas may well stem from having had to endure this phase of the cycle before without having found a good way to live with it, except maybe find a new boy/man and elope. The fact that she hadn't done precisely this years before suggests some kind of bond that mere convenience can't explain, and that Thomas and Abby really had been - and remain - a couple.