47. Grace
forty-seven
“Kyle keeps calling you,” Ethan says, emphasizing the name as he hands me my phone.
Shit. Shitshitshit.
“Um… oh yeah?” I sound breezy enough, right?
The phone rings again.
“Aren’t you gonna pick up?”
I swallow with difficulty, hit the green button on my phone, and turn my back to Ethan. “Hi, hon—Kyle.”
“Hey. I was getting worried.”
“Worried? Oh. About the storm?”
“Yeah. Everything okay with you?”
“I-I’m fine. I mean part of the roof is gone, and my deck is a mess, but other’n that, no physical damage. Everyone in Emerald Creek is safe and sound, thank god. Nothin’ we can’t handle.”
“Is Ethan still here?”
“Yeah, he’s…” I turn around and face Ethan, watching me with his hands on his hips. He might as well have a question mark tattooed on his forehead. “He’s already working on the roof.”
“Oh good. Thank god for Ethan.”
I giggle. “You got that right.”
“Alright then, I’ll let you go. Tell him I said hi.”
“Uh.”
“Or not. Whatever.” I hear the smile in his voice. “Love you, sweetheart. Take care.”
“Love you too.” I hang up and look at Ethan and set the phone slowly on the bathroom vanity.
“And that was Kyle,” Ethan states.
“And that was Kyle. My ex-husband.”
A muscle ticks around his eye, and god I hate myself right now. “Anything you wanna share about honey-Kyle, I love you-Kyle, ’fore I go back up there and risk breaking my neck by fixing your roof?”
I exhale. “Yeah, maybe I should have told you about Kyle before. But, really, it’s nothing.” I walk past him into the bedroom and grab a pair of jeans and a T-shirt.
“‘Honey’ and ‘I love you’ doesn’t sound like nothing to me.”
“I can see how that sounds but…” I can’t avoid this conversation now, can I? “Why don’t we… why don’t we sit down?” I move to the kitchen, pull two cups out of the cupboard, and pour us some coffee.
“Is this a sit-down conversation? Not sure I’m gonna like it.”
“Okay then—let’s not sit down. We can do this standing up.” Forgetting the coffees for now, I pull up a barstool and prop half a butt cheek on it for support. “Kyle and I… we… we were fooling around during college. On and off. He…” I blush and go for it. “He knew about you.”
“During your college years? He knew about me?” He says it as a question, but also a disbelief. My college years were after Ethan and I broke up.
“Yeah. I might have told him about you during a drunken party. Or two. And sober late-night confessions.”
Ethan grunts but doesn’t ask for dates or content, and thank god for that because that might have taken a long time to recap.
“Long story short, since we’re not sitting down.” I take a deep breath and let it all out. “I got pregnant end of senior year in college, and that’s why we got married.”
Ethan goes pale, and I can see the internal back-and-forth he’s having. But I guess he can’t or doesn’t want to draw conclusions, because he simply repeats, “You got pregnant.”
“Yes.”
He runs a hand across his face. His eyes are wet. He takes two steps away and turns around and then faces me again. Then he pulls me off the stool and into his arms. “Fuck, baby. What happened?”
And that’s Ethan. My Ethan. No need to tell him more, he understands. Understands why I got married in a rush to someone who wasn’t meant for me. Also understands why I’m no longer married to him. And maybe even understands why I’m still talking to him, although that may be a different conversation. Hopefully, a later conversation.
“I lost the baby,” I say, my voice muffled against his chest.
His heartbeat increases under my cheek and his hand strokes my back. “Got that part, babe. What happened?”
“These things happen. There was no particular reason. It… it just didn’t…” Make it? Take? Want to be my baby? To this day I still can’t put words on it. On what happened. I used to constantly oscillate between fate and guilt. I knew the statistics and these helped. But sometimes, on my darker days, I couldn’t help but think that maybe my baby didn’t want me. And that was the hardest. I knew it not to be true, and I knew it didn’t make sense, but how could I help how I felt? How my twisted mind needed to make it my fault? To make everything bad that happened to me my fault?
Sometimes I feel these thoughts creeping back, and I fight hard to keep them at bay.
“It just didn’t happen,” I end up telling Ethan.
He closes his arms tighter around me and says nothing for a while, and then he whispers softly, “That explains Skye’s bedroom.”
I pull my face off his chest to look at him. “What?”
He gently brings me back against his quickened heartbeat. “Skye. She would have been your baby’s age?”
Bile rises in my throat. “It’s not like that.” Chris and I always talked openly about Skye needing a female presence in her life, but also not blurring the lines for her. Despite our physical resemblance, I always set people straight when they mistook Skye for my daughter. For her sake and mine. Now, did I go a little overboard by decorating her bedroom here? The jury might be out on that. Me, I don’t think so.
“Course not.” He strokes my back. “I just think… It’s almost like…”
“Just say what you need to say.”
“With Alex now… you know.” What he’s saying is, Alex is taking my place and more in Skye’s life, leaving me empty again. And there’s some truth to that.
I’m immensely grateful to the universe for sending Alex to Chris and Skye. To us. To me. She’s become a close friend. She brought balance to my cousin, and she’ll be a wonderful mother to Skye. But Ethan is right. She’ll be the one taking her to school now, and going to parent meetings, and looking after her when she has a fever. Reading her stories and helping her become a woman. I’ll still be in her life, but it won’t be the same. “I’ll be fine.”
“You deserve this, Grace. I know you want it, and you deserve it.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You’ll be a wonderful mother someday.”
I nod frantically, though I’m not sure I do see that in my future. Not with the way life keeps throwing me curve balls.
We stay quiet for a while. I don’t know what’s going through his mind. I’m trying to find the right words. “I… I felt dead inside. Not just literally. It was hard, and coming back here saved me. Literally. I felt alive again.”
I close my mind and go back to these days. Everything I’d built my new life on—a surprise baby, a new husband I was trying to learn to love as a spouse, a new state, a new environment, a new family. For a few short months, these had been my new reality. I’d worked hard on making them good for me, all for the little bundle of life taking form in my womb.
And then he or she was gone.
Everything was gone.
I couldn’t get out of bed. I didn’t want anything from life. Kyle got worried, and sent me to Emerald Creek to be with Mom, seeing as she couldn’t take time away from work to visit me in Texas.
“I came back to Emerald Creek a couple of weeks later. Just to get better, in my head. And then I never left. There was no reason.”
“How did Kyle feel about that?” Ethan asks softly, trying not to push me, but I feel the insecurity in his voice, and I owe him that. I owe him the truth. “He was fine with me staying in Emerald Creek. Probably relieved.”
Ethan grunts. “But he keeps calling you.”
I look up at Ethan. “We didn’t love each other the way a husband and wife should.” Then I add, “I call him, too, occasionally.”
His jaw tightens but he says nothing. What is he thinking?
“Although he said we should stop talking. Since you came back into my life.”
Ethan looks surprised. “He did?”
“Yeah.” I shrug. “Not that we’re doing anything wrong.”
A small smile plays on his face. “How would you feel if I talked to Ilse every now and then?”
Something like jealousy, possessiveness, stirs in my stomach. “Not great.”
“See?”
“But you were going to marry her.”
He cocks his head. “And you weren’t married?”
It’s not the same. “I guess I see your point.”
He rocks me softly in his arms. “Anything else I need to know about you that you’re not volunteering yet?”
“No,” I whisper.
Then, “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“About Kyle or about the baby?
“About both. Don’t they go together?”
“They don’t. Kyle… it didn’t feel important. I mean, you would have found out eventually.” More like, I was too chicken to tell you I was talking to another man about my feelings for you. “And the baby… it was… it was too much.”
“Too much for me?”
“No. Too much for me. I didn’t even know where to start. I don’t-don’t really talk about it. Ever.”
“Not even to the Bitch Brigade?”
I scootch deeper into his hold and shake my head. “Not anymore. It’s in the past.”
He strokes my back, saying nothing for a while. “I’m gonna go finish that roof for you, and then I’ll take a shower. And then we’re gonna talk about what you need from me.”
I raise my face to meet his gaze. “What do you mean?”
He cups my nape with his hand, kneading the back of my head, and his gaze darkens. “I want to be the man you can talk to about everything and anything.”
My heart booms so hard, there’s no way he doesn’t hear it.
His gaze caresses the frame of my face, and he pads his thumb across my lips. “I get that some of the stuff is hard to unpack just like that, but I’m your best friend on top of being your… everything else. I wish I’d be the man you could talk to about your miscarriage without being forced into it.” He kisses a tear off my cheek. “I want you to be comfortable telling me you’re still talking to Kyle if that’s what you need to. I don’t want you to feel like you need to hide stuff from me.” He kisses the crown of my head. “I want you to feel comfortable telling me you miss Skye like hell even if you’re over the moon happy for her.”
I hug him tighter.
“If the time comes, I want you to feel free to tell me that’s what you want with me.”
“What do you mean?” I whisper.
He lowers his forehead to meet mine and whispers, “You and I—this is all going very fast. But it’s going in one direction. And we both know which direction that is. So if at any time you need from me more than what I’m giving you, you need to tell me. Because sometimes I’m a little thick, a little slow to get with the program. And I’m going to count on you to keep us on track.”
He stands, lifting me with him, sets me on the floor, then gently slaps my ass. “That roof isn’t gonna fix itself,” he says.
Like he didn’t just rock my world.