Chapter 48
CHAPTER 48
For three days, I stayed away from the hospital. I didn’t take calls. I didn’t answer texts. I dragged myself through the motions of sustaining my life by eating and sleeping and keeping Chloe alive, but that was all I was able to manage. I slept for hours at a time, and the rest of my waking time I just sat.
Everything up to this point caught up with me. Everything stressful and bad had been pushed to the background because Jackson had been there to cushion the fall. He had countered everything with his strength and his protective nature, and somehow nothing had been insurmountable. Now, I stood alone and faced an impending hurricane, but my house had disappeared on me. Without Jackson in the background, I felt exposed and unsure of myself.
I determined I needed to come clean to Matt. I needed to end our engagement. I wanted to be brave and tell him that it was over for good. But there never seemed to be a good time to have that talk. So we pretended that everything was fine. My heart hurt so much that my instinct was to hide that pain. In doing so, I carried on like everything was fine. I wanted to be truthful, but the effort was so monumental, I instead busied my mind with the final details of the wedding.
It shocked me how easy it was to pretend. Each moment that ticked away brought us closer to our wedding day.
Thoughts, weird bad thoughts, repeated in my mind. Could I marry Matt? Jackson had ripped my heart out of my chest, so I felt numb. Did it matter one way or another if I married Matt? On an emotional level, I couldn't determine if it would be better for me to marry Matt or to end it.
What if I told Matt that he and I had slept together? He had no memory of the last five months. This baby could be passed off as his.
These dark thoughts gripped my mind as I teetered back and forth like a spinning top. Things had at one time been good between Matt and me. Maybe we could have our happy ending after all? Lots of women had pretended that one man’s baby was another man’s. Was it that bad? Matt would love this child, and this child would have a father. Was that the preferable action than to condemn this child to a lifetime with only me to parent it through life? Was I qualified to parent another human being? Look at the mess my life was in. Would one small lie make that much of a difference in the big picture of things?
It didn’t help that Matt was the master of pretending. He knew that I was struggling, but he glossed over my vacant moods and numb state. If I was going to start this marriage with a lie, who better to start it with than a man who didn’t want my truth?
I knew that Matt wanted the finer things in life. I had a lot of money. I could offer him that life, the vacations and all the trappings that he desired. In exchange, I would give my child a father.
Sometimes, I came to grips with my insane thoughts and returned to the fact that I needed to just end this charade, but no matter how much I tried, I could not find the strength within me to speak the truth .
There was a small, traitorous part of me that hoped that while Matt was still in my life, there was a chance I would see Jackson. Maybe he would show up at the hospital? Perhaps I would run into him outside in the parking lot? How pathetic that I would delay the inevitable for just one more glimpse of him. One more conversation. One more moment.
I couldn’t accept that I would never see Jackson again. If I married Matt, at least I would be fed small tidbits about Jackson’s life. As crazy as it was, that was almost the best reason I had to marry Matt.
Then I ran out of time.