“You went through that all alone.” He places a hand over my heart, and I don’t know why, out of all the reactions and emotions he’s working through, this is what breaks me. It’s as if he’s surveying that damage. After all these years, he’s looking at the wreckage only to find that it’s no longer reparable.
“It’s okay. It’s okay.” I repeat it, over and over again. And I don’t even know if I believe it. If, after all these years, I’m still mourning over something that could’ve been. But I have to be. I have to be okay with it. I have Sadie, and my life, and so much more that I wouldn’t change a single thing for, and for all of that, I have to be okay.
He starts to kiss my face. On my cheek as the tears pour, on my chin as if he’s catching them before they fall into the space between us, on my forehead, soothing away whatever guilt he’s held onto all these years.
“It’s okay,” I say one more time.
“I should’ve been there.”
* * *
I don’t know how long we’ve been lying here on the couch with our bodies pressed against each other, but I can tell the sun is slowly setting outside. I see the orange glow mix with the purple haze of dusk streaming in from the floor-to-ceiling windows. Everett’s fingertips graze my arm, moving in slow, drowsy strokes while my arm rests lazily across his stomach. Our legs are loosely tangled around each other, and this feels like the most carefree I’ve been in a long time.
We’ve been talking on a random tangent, saying things on our minds as they pop up without any direction or path. I ask him about his mom’s new husband. He asks me to tell him about Sadie’s birth, like how long I was in labor and who she looked like when she came out. He chuckles when I tell him she looked like Hasbro came out with a russet potato model of a Cabbage Patch Doll. And I giggle when he tells me about his mom’s sixtieth birthday when his stepdad surprised her with a new puppy who chewed through her favorite pair of cowboy boots.
“Daniel.”
I nuzzle my nose against his chest. “Hmm?”
“If it was a boy, I wanted to name him Daniel.”
I look up at him, turning my face to see his gaze is fixed on the recessed light fixtures on the ceiling. He finally looks at me, those deep brown eyes melancholy and mournful.
“When you told me you weren’t pregnant after all, I was a little disappointed,” he continues. “I mean, a part of me was relieved because we were kids ourselves, but I started planning this future for us. Moving into a small one-bedroom apartment just outside of San Diego, somewhere where your parents and my mom wouldn’t meddle and let us have our own lives. And I got excited to see you with a big ol’ pregnant belly.”
“But you…”
“I know I was upset,” he says, explaining himself. “My dad…he cheated on my mom. Again. And he got this woman pregnant. I kept thinking how I’m no better than my dad. That I couldn’t be responsible enough to avoid an unwanted pregnancy, and how badly I’d let my mom down. But after I got over that initial shock that my own kid and my dad’s baby were going to be the same age, I started to realize how much I loved you. How this meant we could watch each other become parents, and that there’d be this little baby that’s half you and half me.”
“Why didn’t you tell me? About your dad?”
He shakes his head. “I was so embarrassed. He’d obviously not learned his lesson. Turned out that the woman was just trying to blackmail him, and there was no baby at all. And my mom…she was so desperate to make things work. She kept saying it was all her fault, that she threw him into the arms of his mistress. She tried so hard to make it work. That’s why we went back home. She…she thought by going back, he’d realize what he was missing.”
“I’m sorry,” I say softly, my cheek pressed against him. “I’m sorry you went through that alone. And your mom…I know it couldn’t have been easy on her either.”
“I guess we both needed each other.” He pauses before adding, “I had my first panic attack in college. I was walking to class. I was a little late and rushing. At first, I thought I was just winded from walking too fast or something, but then I felt like…I wasn’t ever going to catch my breath. It felt like I was dying, and I was vividly aware of it.
“I saw a doctor. I thought I was getting asthma or something, and they told me I should talk to someone. Like a therapist.”
“When’s the last time it happened?”
“About six years ago,” he answers calmly. “I’ve been getting pretty good with working through it before it gets out of hand.” After another short pause, he adds, “Josh doesn’t know, does he?”
“How did you know?”
“He wouldn’t have asked me to come if he knew,” he says. “He wouldn’t have forgiven me.”
“James did.”
“Yeah,” he says morosely. “But it’s different. Josh was one of my best friends.”
“Do you regret coming? Reopening our past like this?”
“Teeny.” His hand is cupping my face, forcing me to look at him. “I came back for you. Whatever past you want to bring up, I came to face it.”
“But you knew I was married…”
“Yeah, I knew.”
