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Still, maybe an emotional purging is exactly what I needed.
So I laid it all out there. My fears, my worries, my stresses. How I loved him but I didn’t like him right now and wasn’t sure if I should trust him. How the thought of raising this child alone terrified me, not only for my sake, when I knew the days and nights would be long, but the years would pass in a blink, but for the sake of my child, who would have to split its time between two homes, two families, two parents who couldn’t find a way to love each other enough to make it work.
“Do you even want to make it work?” Brie asked quietly.
“No. Maybe. I don’t fucking know, B,” I said, dropping my head into my hands.
And that’s when the first tear fell.
Like a crack in a dam, once that first drop was free, I exploded into noisy, messy crying, the kind that had me wailing like I was in physical pain. That had my baby sister curling her arms around me and pulling me onto her lap like I was a small child that needed comforting.
I mean…obviously, I needed comforting.
“I don’t want to do this alone,” I said, the words broken by sobs. “And I hate him for doing this to me, for doing this tous.”
And I didn’t mean only me and him. I meant me, him,andour child. Whether we liked it or not, we were bringing another life into this world. We could’ve had it all. The family, the happy home, the unwavering love and support. I’d been prepared to give him everything.
“How can I love someone who refuses to see the best in me?”
Brie sighed. “Unfortunately, us Delatou girls have a habit of falling for men like that,” she said with a sad, knowing smile.
I didn’t have to ask who she meant, but I hated that she understood this pain. I hated that she knew what it was like to give her heart away to a man who’d probably never look at her the same way as she did him. It gutted me, for both of us.
But Brie could escape her prison eventually—hopefully.
Unfortunately for me, I was locked in this cell for the rest of my life now, and no one was coming to save me.
Wallowing wouldn’t do me any good.
So I crawled off Brie’s lap and sat up, squaring my shoulders and wiping the tear tracks from my face. I certainly looked like hell, and I’d have to touch up my makeup before I could set foot outside this office and face the world again, but at the moment, I had bigger fish to fry.
Namely…
“So…what’s under the tinfoil?”
Brie laughed, a high, melodic sound—still girlish despite the fact that she was in her mid-twenties—that had always been my favorite of my sisters’.
“Just this new recipe I’ve been experimenting with. Tanya Geralt found this old cookbook of Granny’s when she was cleaning out the attic space at the restaurant a few years ago, and she thought I might like it. I’ve slowly been working my way through it.”
“You never told us that,” I said, tears once again springing to my eyes, though happy ones this time. Brie had been only a few years old when Granny had died, but I remembered her well—mostly by smell. True to her “Granny Smith” moniker, she often smelled like apples and butter and cinnamon; the woman was perpetually baking an apple pie. It warmed my heart that Brie could get to know her this way, through their mutual love of food.
Brie simply shrugged. “I wanted to keep it to myself for a while. I’m afraid someone will want to take it.”
“We would never,” I said. “You’re Baker Brie, remember?”
She giggled at the childhood nickname, when we’d always poke fun at her permanent attachment to her Easy-Bake Oven.
Although, even then, we openly enjoyed reaping the fruits of her labor, just as we do now.
“Anyway,” my sister said, at last removing the tinfoil from the plate with a flourish. “I present to you…baklava cheesecake.”
“My two favorite words.”
Honestly, there was no heartache a bit of home cooking couldn’t cure.
At least…that’s what Granny always said.
I returned to Michiganthe middle of the following week, three days before the Labor Day weekend festivities were set to begin, feeling refreshed with a renewed sense of purpose.
