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“It means that I think she’s helped you a lot even if you don’t realize it. Even if you can’t sleep right now. I think you should trust her. At least consider it.”
She didn’t respond, but she knew that he was right. He kissed her softly. She moaned. It had been days since they’d been in bed together. His mouth moved down to her neck. “Want me to clear your head?” he asked against her skin.
Josie laughed even as she felt desire and need wake deep inside her.
“It’s been a few days. You think we could start trying for that baby again?”
She stiffened and he felt it. He lifted his head and met her eyes. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I guess that’s not sexy.”
“No,” she said. “It’s not that.”
He studied her face. “Tell me.”
“I just—this case—these kids…I keep thinking about their parents. I mean, some of them are terrible. Well, maybe not terrible, but not great and I look at them and think, ‘well, we’d do a better job than that, surely,’ and then I see other parents who are fully invested in their kids, kind and caring and protective, and it’s like they did everything they could to nurture and protect their children and sometimes none of it matters.”
Noah adjusted his pillow under his head and then returned his hand to her body, resting it on her hip. She was grateful for the connection, for how intently he listened to her.
“What do you mean, none of it matters?”
“Sometimes those kids end up dead and their parents end up shattered and you can’t stop that, Noah. You can try, but there are millions of ways to lose someone and for every way that you think you can prevent, there are two that you can’t.”
“That’s true,” he said.
Josie felt tears sting the backs of her eyes. She gave a little laugh and swatted his chest. “Aren’t you supposed to be reassuring me?”
“I don’t like empty reassurance,” he said. “I think that part of life is being honest about things that are horribly but unequivocally true. Pretending they’re not doesn’t make them go away or make them less frightening.”
“So what? We’re supposed to bring a child into this world knowing that at any moment, no matter how hard we try to keep them safe, they could be taken from us?”
“Yes,” Noah said. “Basically. Josie, any of us can be taken at any time. We keep going. We survive. We do the best we can with what we have.”
A tear leaked from her eye and Noah wiped it away with the pad of his thumb.
“But a child, Noah,” she squeaked.
He stared at her silently for a beat. “When you think about Harris, you have a lot of fear, don’t you?”
“Yes,” she said. “I’m terrified all the time that something will happen to him.”
“But you love him.”
“Of course.”
“Which is stronger? Your fear or your love?”
Her answer was automatic. “My love for him.”
He let that sink in.
“Boy,” Josie said. “This ‘no regrets’ thing is hard as hell.”
Noah laughed.
She had vowed, after Mettner’s death, to live with no regrets, as he had, but it had seemed so much easier in theory, when she was locked in an embrace with Amber at Mettner’s grave. In that moment she had felt emboldened and fearless, but the truth was that incorporating the philosophy into her daily life was painfully difficult.
“I know,” Noah said. “But trying to live like that honors Mett, and that’s the least we can do for him.”
Josie wiggled closer to him, and he moved his hand up and down her back. She felt tense muscles in her shoulder blades loosen and some knot of apprehension deep inside her begin to unravel. “Okay,” she said. “Clear my head.”
