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DREW
Iinsisted on dragging the portable firepit out of the garage and grabbing Sadie a blanket and some water. In truth, I was trying to delay the inevitable. Put off whatever speech she was working herself up to give.
Once I had us all settled, we sat side by side in the chairs and stared at the fire for a long, quiet stretch. If I was lucky, maybe she would doze off and I could carry her up to her room and put this whole thing off until tomorrow. Pretend I’d never answered her phone. Pretend the outside world didn’t exist. I’d been good at that over the last five years. Until she’d shown up.
Eventually I couldn’t take it anymore and I let myself look at her. Even disheveled and drunk, she was still stunning. Her olive-colored skin glowed in the firelight, and even though I had no right to, I wanted to run my fingers over every inch of it. Wrap my fist up in her dark, silky hair. Watch the tiny green flecks that formed a ring around her irises glitter when she got angry. Or turned on.
My ribs grew tight. My chance to do any of that was over after this morning.
It was time to face the music. As much as I wanted to ignore the impending demise of whatever this was between us, being this close to her and knowing it was all going to implode any second was torture. Might as well pull the pin and toss the first grenade.
“I answered your phone tonight. Talked to Aileen.”
Her face went slack, and one eyebrow raised a millimeter, but she didn’t take on the expression of rage I anticipated at the news that I’d been so bold as to invade her privacy like that.
“Oh?”
“She was calling and texting nonstop. I figured if there was an emergency, I could hunt you down. I realize I had no business—”
“It’s fine.” She waved me off. “How much did she tell you?”
“Not a whole lot. She mentioned today was a bad day for you too.” I tried to swallow past the ache in the back of my throat. “And she referred to herself as ‘practically your mother-in-law.’” I stared into the fire, not ready to look at her.
But when she snorted, I couldn’t stop myself from staring at her. Her head shook in a slow, side-to-side motion. Moisture gathered at the corner of her eyes. When she finally turned the full force of those big brown eyes on me, her expression sucked any remaining doubt or resentment out of me and replaced it with a burning need to comfort her. I wanted to drag her into my lap and wrap her up in my arms, so she’d never have to look like that again.
“Is that why you’re speaking to me again? No point in being mad at me about the Ivy situation since you’ve already put your walls back up—because you think I’m married?”
Hearing her say it out loud felt like someone took a hot poker to my gut.
“Do you honestly think that’s who I am? That I’m here cheating on someone with you?” The hurt painted across her face gutted me.
“No,” I shook my head, “but maybe you’re about to be? Or—fuck—I don’t know, Sadie.” I gripped my hair. “A million different possibilities of what she could have meant have been running through my head all night and I—”
“He died five years ago.” She cut me off.
Five years ago.
“Five years ago?”
“Five years ago today. And he wasn’t the only person I lost…” She pushed out a long exhale as I wrapped my mind around the date. “Josh and I were high school sweethearts, and we went to college together. We had no doubts about our future, which I guess was a little arrogant of us at that age.” Her laugh held no humor. “Sophomore year I accidentally got pregnant.”
Some caveman piece deep in the folds of my brain was simultaneously pleased at the thought of her pregnant and beyond jealous at the thought of her carrying some other guy’s child.
“We were so young, everyone thought we were crazy. But we were excited. Our plan was to get married after college anyway and eventually have kids. So this just kicked everything into gear a bit earlier. We got engaged. We figured out how we were going to adjust our class schedules for the next few years so we could both finish. It was only supposed to take one extra semester. We had a whole new ten-year plan for how we were going to tackle the life laid out in front of us.”
Ten-year plans? If she was the kind of person who had ten-year plans, I was well and truly fucked. Most of the time, my plans didn’t extend beyond deciding whether I was going to leave the house on a given day.
“What happened?” I asked, dreading the rest of her story but too invested not to ask.
“I was twenty-two weeks along and things were going fine. Then one night I started having tons of bleeding.” She swiped her thumbs under her eyes and continued, her voice rough with emotion. “I was supposed to be meeting Josh later for dinner that night. I called him and told him I was going to the hospital, and he was going to meet me there. When I got to the hospital…there was nothing they could do. It’s called a placental abruption. It was too severe. It was too early in the pregnancy. They couldn’t save the baby.”
She said the words with the clinical detachment of someone who had explained the nuances of their tragedy too many times. It killed me that she was reliving this for my benefit.
“Josh.” She took another deep breath. “Josh was on the way to the hospital when a car crossed the middle of the road and hit him head-on. So while I lay in the hospital, fighting not to bleed to death and wishing they could save our baby, he was being air-lifted to another hospital across town. But he didn’t make it.”
Jesus.How was this woman still standing after everything life had thrown at her? “Sadie, I—”
“There’s more.”
