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His insides shook from the enormity of the emotions rushing through him. He could never have a family with Liz, never have a family period. What if he passed on this horrible disease to an innocent child?
“I never led you to believe we had a future together,” he reminded her. She loved him and that was yet another reason he had to let her go.
“Didn’t you?”
Her two words echoed around the room, around his heart.
“Liz,” he sighed, not able to stand her pain. “Don’t do this to us.”
“Have you forgotten? There is no us.” With that she raced out the door and into the foggy night.
* * *
Liz had never been much of a crier, but she’d cried until she hadn’t thought she’d had any tears left on the day Gramps had died and on the day that followed, but she’d been wrong. She’d had lots of tears left. Seas full. Adam had proved that to her time and again these past weeks. She could only assume hormones caused her weepiness.
Either
that or her broken heart.
She wiped at her eyes, cursing both her tear-blurred vision and the thick fog obscuring the road. She was sure the fog hadn’t been this heavy when she’d driven to Adam’s. Otherwise she’d never have come to his place tonight.
No, that wasn’t true. She’d been in a bad way, needing to tell him about their baby. She would have confronted him tonight regardless. She’d dealt with a mother who’d run out on her years ago and a father who’d never cared enough to be a part of her life.
Adam had rejected her, too. He didn’t love her. He’d said he didn’t, told her to her face. Why did his words feel so wrong? Surely she hadn’t thought he had to love her just because she loved him? Just because he’d made love to her so sweetly, so tenderly?
All those times he’d held her, kissed her, made her feel alive when she’d felt dead inside, it had all been in the name of sex.
One didn’t spend a year with someone because of sex. Did they? If not for sex, then why? Why had he been hers exclusively for so long if he wasn’t into commitment?
She blinked, clearing her eyes and wishing her windshield wipers could clear the fog shrouding her view.
God, she just wanted to get home, curl up in bed in the room she’d slept in since the age of four. The room she’d made love to Adam in just last week when she’d hoped things would go back to being wonderful between them.
She’d recognized the wild desperation in him.
He’d known that night would be their last.
What didn’t make sense was why he’d be so desperate when he was the one bringing the relationship to an end.
Tears blurred her eyes again. Even had they not, Liz wasn’t sure she could have missed the deer that leapt in front of her car and sent her careening off the highway.
CHAPTER EIGHT
IN SLOW increments Liz became aware of her surroundings. Bright lights shone above her face, making opening her eyes difficult. Or maybe it was the pounding in her head that made the slightest movement seem impossible.
Although the light gave off heat, her insides felt cold. Too cold. Almost as if she were buried in snow.
The thought filled her with panic, panic she would have thought vivid enough to push her into motion, but nothing happened. No flailing arms. No kicking. No screaming. No anything.
Summoning all her strength, she forced one eye open, then the other, and flinched from the intensity of the light shining over her.
“Liz?” her friend Mona, an ER nurse, asked. “Can you hear me, Liz?”
Of course she could hear her. She would have told her but speaking required more energy than she could find. Odd, that.
“Liz?”
Liz looked beyond Mona’s worried face to where she focused on Dr Larry Graviss’s face. The emergency room doctor’s eyes narrowed.
