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At one point, she stumbled and fell on her ass. Pain radiated through her tailbone, but she ignored it and returned to her feet while what was left of her mind shattered.
“Ayesha, I can’t let you walk away while you’re like this. I’ve never seen you like this, and you can’t possibly think I’ll let you deal with this on your own.”
“Joel, I think I killed Curtis.”
His voice changed, as if his vocal cords had gotten trapped underwater. “Sweetheart, you didn’t. How could you?”
“The second I let Adrían touch me, I practically danced on Curtis’ grave.”
“Was Adrían the first man to approach you since Curtis died? I guarantee you that he wasn’t. So, maybe there’s a reason you let yourself…feel something for Adrían. I can’t stand the man, but I’m positive he would never do anything to hurt you. Neither would Curtis. Neither will I.”
His words simultaneously made perfect sense and no sense at all.
“Where’s Theo?” she asked. “Josiah?”
“They’re at school, remember?”
She glanced over his shoulder at the large body of water that spanned one side of the property. Tears seized her throat, and she stopped short of screaming to release the agony inside her that didn’t have anywhere to go.
“I didn’t protect him,” she whispered. “I didn’t protect him. I didn’t protect him. What if he’d killed him? What if I’d walked into my baby boy’s room and…” She clutched her stomach. “Oh, God. He could have killed my baby.”
“Ayesha, you are thebestpart of me, Theo, and Josiah’s lives,” Joel said. “Babe, you’re my mornings, my evenings, my nights. You’re my thoughts,” he closed the distance between them and set her hand on his chest, “and the strength behind each beat of my fucking heart. How could one thing, that you had no control over, make you a bad mother? Do you think Josiah would say you were? Theo? Say you forgot my birthday…does that make you a bad wife?”
The rims of his eyes had turned red.
His voice was unsteady.
Professionally, she knew anxiety could get severe enough to essentially send the mind into fission. It was why she worked so hard to make sure her clients never reached this level of despair. In the absence of any diagnosed psychosis, severe anxiety could cause delusions and hallucinations, and she was not on the stable side at the moment.
“I’m going for a walk,” she said. “My head…I’m going for a walk.”
Joel stared at her, those unnaturally beautiful eyes of his piercing holes in her steadily crumbling soul. “Ayesha, can I help you?”
“Where are Josiah and Theo?”
“At school, sweetheart.”
“I need to walk.”
“Let me—”
“By myself. I need a…give me a minute.”
She toyed with the roped strands of her hair and walked backward, heading down the driveway toward the road that looped around the giant piece of property.
Joel’s eyes followed her the entire way.
When she reached the road, she turned and started down the tree-lined road pathway. Josiah and Theo meant the world to her. They came from her body, and even before she saw their faces, she’d promised to love and protect them to the best of her ability. Yet, in the most egregious way, she’d failed them.
* * *
Cool afternoon winds chilled her nose. The road surface left indentations in her bare feet. Every so often, her heartbeat stumbled behind her sternum before returning to its muted cadence.
There had to be some sort of divine punishment for what she’d let happen to Theo. Some celestial consequence. In the few days she’d lasted in an online breastfeeding group, she’d felt like a witch in Salem in the seventeenth century after sharing that she’d given Theo infant formula. Had she revealed this bit of information, they would have sent the Secret Service.
The stress episodes started when she was a child. When she found her mother facedown in the backyard with blue lips, she’d run for the “needle pen” her mother had told her to use and called 911. By then, it was too late.
A wasp killed her mother.
