Page 72 of The Has-Been

I don’t even know the man lying before me anymore.

The man I fell in love with used to be so funny. He was there when you needed him. A man who didn’t argue with me—didn’t say hurtful things just because he was hurting. No, he would have rather harmed himself than me.

But not anymore…

“Liam—” I choke out, hand pressed firmly on my abdomen, blood-soaked shorts plastered to my body as I stand.

“What—” he murmurs after a second, his eyelids heavy with sleep.

“Liam—I need you to⁠—”

“Aubrey, is it that fucking important that it can’t wait until the morning?” he says, rolling in the bed, his words slurring together.

His words break that last thread holding me together. And I know I’ll never be full again. I’m nothing but broken, shattered fragments.

“Yeah—” I whisper solemnly. “Yeah, actually it can.”

I choke back my tears, swallowing them down thickly. I shove my hand over my mouth, muffling my choked sounds. I grab a pair of sweatpants, hand still over my abdomen as an ache runs through me.

What am I supposed to do? Where am I supposed to go?

My hands violently shake at my sides as I sneak down my condo’s steps, unthinkingly, as I make my way to the living room.

I crumble to the floor, curling myself into a ball. I sit like that. Until I hear the sound of footsteps down the hall.

I find Reese’s dark gaze as she throws herself onto the floor beside me.

“Reese,” I whisper into her hair, words catching in my swollen throat, “Reese, I need you to take me to the hospital.” She says something, but I don’t hear her. Not as I say, “I think I’m losing the baby.”

She rocks me back and forth on the floor until my breathing steadies.

When I speak again, my words are few, but final. “I don’t think I can do this anymore.”

The memory replays in my mind over and over. Until I say the words I wanted to scream at him that very night.

“Don’t leave me alone.”

There is more I want to say—I need to say. Part of me wants to release it, free the words from my mind.

I lost our baby.

The words are right there, right at the tip of my tongue.

Just the thought of him leaving me alone again with these feelings, all resurfacing from being back in that hospital…

I can’t do it by myself.

Not again.

It’s all flooding back to me. My failure. The loss of something I never really had, but wanted all the same.

A family. A life. Him.

The small part of us that was once growing inside me, forever with me, a tidal wave of emotion and grief that I had to go through on my own.

Sure, Reese was there. And she was wonderful, but it wasn’t the same, wasn’t the one person I was desperate for.

He was.