“They need you to rest,” Beth countered gently. “You’ve been through something terrible.”
You have no idea, Sunny thought, though she appreciated the older woman’s concern. How could Beth — how could anyone — understand the particular devastation of losing a child who had existed only in blood tests and whispered plans?
Beth hesitated, then set down the stack of folded towels she’d been holding. She pulled out a chair at the kitchen table and sat, her weathered hands coming to rest on the polished wood.
“I lost one, too,” she said quietly, her voice steady but soft. “My first. Almost forty years ago now.”
Sunny paused, caught off guard by this unexpected revelation from the usually private housekeeper.
“I was three months along. Far enough to have started dreaming, not farenough for anyone else to think it mattered much.” Beth smoothed an invisible wrinkle from the tablecloth. “My husband and I never told a soul. Back then, you just… didn’t talk about such things.”
Sunny sank into the chair opposite her. “How did you get through it?”
Beth’s eyes were clear, unclouded by tears but deep with remembered pain. “Not gracefully, I’ll tell you that. I spent three days in bed. Then I got up because I had to. Because life doesn’t stop, even when you think it should.”
She reached across the table, her warm hand covering Sunny’s cold one. “The hole never completely closes. But you learn to carry it differently as time passes.”
It wasn’t false reassurance or empty platitudes. It was just truth, offered without expectation — the simple acknowledgment that Sunny wasn’t alone in this particular pain, that others had walked this path before her.
“Thank you,” Sunny whispered, turning her palm up to squeeze Beth’s hand. “For telling me.”
Beth nodded, standing with quiet dignity. This moment of connection didn’t heal Sunny’s grief, but it anchored her somehow, providing a tiny handhold in the slippery descent of loss. Someone else understood. Someone else had survived.
After the girls left for school, the house echoed with silence. Sunny drifted from room to room, unable to settle, unable to rest despite her exhaustion. In the bathroom, she found herself opening the cabinet, reaching for the pregnancy test she’d hidden in the back of the drawer.
The plastic stick felt impossibly small in her hand — such a tiny object to have contained so much hope. The two pink lines still visible in the result window now seemed like a cruel joke, a promise broken before it could be fulfilled.
Sunny closed her eyes, allowing herself to indulge, just for a moment, in the fantasy of what might have been. A nursery decorated in soft yellows and greens. Liam’s large hands cradling a tiny swaddled form. The girls cooing over their new sibling. The five of them, a complete family.
The fantasy dissolved, replaced by the cold reality of loss. Sunny replaced the test in the cabinet, unable to discard it yet, but unwilling to torture herself by keeping it in view.
Passing Liam’s study on her way back to the bedroom, Sunny paused at the partially open door. She could see him sitting at his desk, head in his hands. He hadn’t gone to a team meeting after all. He was just…hiding. From her. From their shared pain.
As she watched, he reached for a silver frame on his desk — one of the many photos of Kate that still adorned the house. His thumb traced the edge of the image with such tender reverence that Sunny felt like an intruder witnessing something deeply private.
Sunny backed away silently, not wanting him to know she had seen. The distance between them, which had begun as a hairline crack the night before, now stretched wide as a canyon. She didn’t know how to bridge it, or if Liam even wanted to even try.
Liam
The sharp scrape of Liam’s skates cut through the silence of the empty rink. Four-thirty in the morning. Three hours before official practice. The cavernous arena held nothing but the echo of his labored breathing and the violent slashing of his stick against the ice.
Slash. Skate. Turn. Shoot.
His muscles screamed in protest as he pushed himself through another grueling drill. Sweat poured down his face, stinging his eyes and soaking through his practice jersey. The physical pain was a welcome distraction from the hollow ache that had taken up permanent residence in his chest since the events at the medical center four days.
It’s not fair. We only had a few days to be happy about it.
Sunny’s broken voice haunted him as he slammed another puck toward the empty net. The black disc ricocheted off the post with a metallic clang that reverberated through the empty arena.
“Dammit!” he snarled, his voice bouncing back at him from the rafters.
He bent over, hands on his knees, gasping for breath. For a moment, the empty rink blurred, replaced by the sterile white of a hospital room. Sunny’s tear-streaked face. The gentle, apologetic voice of Dr Chen.
Liam straightened with a violent jerk, as if physically throwing off the memory. He skated to center ice, gathered the scattered pucks, and started again.
Slash. Skate. Turn. Shoot.
By the time other players began filtering in for regular practice, Liam had been on the ice for nearly three hours. His legs felt like lead, his lungs burned with each breath, and still he pushed on.
