Chapter 21
Jackson
Ifelt my baby kick.
The scan Ellie gave me is proof that this is real. I’ve watched Ellie’s belly get bigger and rounder, a sign our baby is growing inside of her.
But that kick…
In my car, my fingers tighten around the wheel, and my eyes close as my head tilts back against the seat headrest.
My eyes burn.
I’d come so close to sliding my arms around my beautiful wife, dipping my head and pressing my lips to hers. She’d have shoved me away. Probably even dragged the back of her hand across her mouth, removing the taste of my kiss.
She doesn’t want me, but I ache for her.
My gaze lingers on the front door of the house where we always planned to raise our kids.
A boy and a girl to complete our family.
Her parents gifted us a swing set in the backyard.
I imagined pushing them, my kids yelling at me to push them higher, and Ellie watching with a smile on her beautiful face, telling me not to listen to them.
And I threw that future away for something so stupid and cruel to Ellie.
“Go, Jackson,” I murmur. “Ellie needs space. Go.”
I start the engine, buckle up, and drive away from the house, leaving the suburbs behind and heading toward downtown and my sterile glass and stainless steel apartment.
It’s quiet.
As I unlock the front door and push it open, it’s always the first thing I notice. The first thing I hate.
There’s no smiling wife to greet me with a kiss and a hug that I always extend, making her laugh when I wrap my arms around her and lift her feet off the floor.
My keys hit the bowl on the side table with a clatter, the sound so loud, it startles me.
The door clicks shut behind me.
With a sigh, I slip out of my jacket and hang it in the coat closet beside the front door. My cell phone joins my keys on the side table.
And I stand there.
Usually, when I get home from work, I head for the shower, sometimes the gym, or get to work on a client file I brought home. I’m not drowning in so much work that I need to bring it home with me, but it passes the hours before bed. While I’m working, I’m not missing Ellie.
But today, I have no work.
My couch with the laptop on the glass coffee table isn’t tempting me to cross over to sink into squeaky white leather, and my empty belly isn’t enough of a motivation to head to the kitchen and pull out a frozen dinner to heat.
I could go see Wade, maybe text one of our friends and see if they want to meet up for dinner or a drink at a bar. But I’d be terrible company today. Morose and quiet.
If I called my parents, they’d invite me over for dinner. Naturally, the conversation would turn to Ellie. To the baby. To how I felt when my baby kicked.
And all the sadness and the pain would come crashing back.
Better to be alone.
I lean my back against the wall beside the door, my eyes closed, my shoes still on when I need to take them off.
Today felt like the start of something. Ellie letting me touch her. Letting me get close. And for a split second, with my hand on her belly and her head tipped up to me, a soft smile curving her lips, it had felt as if she wanted me to kiss her.
That she wanted me.
I squeeze my eyes shut, whispering under my breath, my voice hoarse and rough with the tears I nearly shed sitting in my car outside her—not our—home. “Please let this be the start of something. Please let me not have broken Ellie and me so utterly that there’s no way back.”
My phone vibrates loudly on the side table.
My eyes snap open, hope curling in my belly as I dive toward it.
Maybe it’s Ellie inviting me to go back. Maybe she’s calling to say her feelings are still strong, still loving, and she wants me to come home.
I barely see the name on the screen. That’s how fast I stab the answer button.
“Yes,” I demand, my breath in my throat and the phone against my ear.
“Mr. Olsen, I’m Edwin Pierce calling from Linklater’s Insurance about a deal that y—”
Fuck. You.
Mouth twisted in a sneer, I yank the phone from my ear and end the call while he’s mid-word.
I start to throw the damn thing across the room, wanting it nowhere near me.
A soft, sinuous voice fills my head.
Call her. Something nearly happened before. You felt it. She must have felt it too. Call her and tell her you still love her. That you never stopped.
I stare at my phone, willing myself to do it. I give myself the same talk I would before a college hockey game, and as an NHL rookie.
And I… do nothing but stare at my phone and fear a tentacle squeezing my heart.
This isn’t a hockey game where I always went out looking to win. It hurt when I lost, but it never took long to brush the disappointment away and get back on the ice again.
There’s no dusting myself off and carrying on if I fuck up this call.
I could make things worse. Could say something stupid like the day I saw Ellie in the coffee shop and mentioned wedding vows.
Why the fuck had I brought up vows after I cheated on her, arguably the most painful way a husband can betray his wife?
Her face had shut down.
I remember her voice, so clinical and cold when she said, “Don’t talk to me about wedding vows.”
Of course not.
“I promise to honor, be faithful, and be true.”
I said that to her. Promised her that I would. And I broke those vows, not once but twice. Kissing Rachel was wrong. If I’d told Ellie right after, got to my knees, apologized, and never fucked up again, I could have saved our marriage.
But instead, I’d done something worse.
I had sex with another woman on the day she was coming to tell me she was pregnant with the child we’ve both always wanted.
I miss her. God, I miss her so damn much.
Setting my phone down, I move away from it so I’m not tempted to do something that would only fuck things up between us again. I’m too desperate to hold my wife in my arms to not mess up.
I know I’m feeling sorry for myself right now. I should stop, focus on the positive: that Ellie even wants to talk to me. That our baby is healthy. That our friends and family are okay.
But today, all I can focus on is missing Ellie. Of needing her. Of wanting her so much that it hurts.
My chest aches, and my throat burns.
Everything keeps going back to Ellie.
Everything.
I’ve barely slept since she left me.
And when I sleep, I turn over, reaching for her in my half-conscious state, and she’s never there. Suddenly, I’m wide awake, staring at the empty space beside me.
Life has slipped into shades of gray. My days feel hollow. Something is always missing. Something so important, so crucial that I never realized how big a presence Ellie was in my heart.
It’s not just the big things: the way she took care of me and the house.
She lit me up in ways I never noticed, and now she’s gone, and I’m alone, I’m living in the shadows, desperate for a glimmer of her light to touch me. To warm me.
But I messed things up, and now I get to live with the consequences. There’s no going back in time and pushing Rachel away before that kiss. There’s no future with Ellie in my life as anything other than the mother of my child.
I’ll have to stand there, do nothing but swallow my hurt and my pain when she meets someone else, and she will meet someone else. Someone who will see how special she is, love her, and not fuck things up the way I did.
She’ll get married again. Maybe even have a child or two with that man.
And I’ll still be there, picking our child up, taking them for the weekend, trying not to notice Ellie standing in the doorway with her new husband, kissing him, snuggling up beside him… waiting for me to leave so they can go up to their bed and…
“Stop.” I press my shaking hand to my face, covering my eyes, but that image is branded inside my brain. There’s no shutting it out.
When I open my eyes, it’s to a cold, sterile apartment.
No Ellie.
I have to get out of here, or I’ll go insane.
But not to a bar or to get drunk again. That version of me is in the past. I have to be a better man, even if Ellie doesn’t see it or care. I have to do it for me.
I head to my bedroom, quickly changing out of my suit and into my gym clothes. On my way out, I grab my gym bag from the coat closet, step into my sneakers, and snatch up my keys and cell phone from beside the front door.
Home from the gym a couple of hours later, I dump my keys in the bowl on the side table and head straight for the shower to wash the sweat from my body.
As always, my mind is calm, and my muscles are sore in the best way after a hard workout.
When my mind swings back to Ellie and how much I miss her, I yank my focus elsewhere.
On the next kids’ coaching lesson. Or the client file I need to finish up for my boss.
Anything except that pleasure-pain of resting my hand on Ellie’s belly, feeling my baby kick for the first time, and knowing it might be the last time I ever feel it.
The last time Ellie tells me about it.
The last time she lets me touch her.
I cut the water off, reaching for a towel to wipe my wet face, telling myself the moisture on my cheeks is just water, nothing else.
My eyes are red when I catch a glimpse of my reflection in the mirror, and I swipe my hand across it to clear the steam away, trying to convince myself that I didn’t just spend the last few minutes crying in the shower.
Drying off on my way to my bedroom, I pull a pair of sweatpants and a T-shirt from my dresser, tossing the towel into the hamper in the corner of the room on my way out.
It’s glass and stainless steel everything in here.
It took a second to get comfortable feeling so exposed.
I can see out through the glass walls that look down on Melton, but no one can look in.
The realtor said it was a special kind of glass.
I hadn’t believed her until I’d left the apartment building after she’d shown me the unit and all the added amenities on the roof.
With one hand shielding the sun from my eye, I tipped my head back, peered up at the building, and learned she was right. From the outside, the glass looked dull gray. Maybe I could just about make out the shape of a piece of furniture in one of the lower-floor units, but barely.
I’d taken the unit. The realtor had waffled on about the amenities: the gym with only two treadmills, which I knew I would never use; the free coffee station, where you could get two free glasses of wine or beer on a Friday night; the leather armchairs; and the workstations.
None of that crap had made a difference to me.
It was downtown, close to work, not exorbitantly expensive, and came fully furnished. More importantly, it came with a six-month lease, which is about as much as I thought I could take living in such a cold-looking apartment.
That’s all I cared about.
I make a stop at the open-concept kitchen, grab a banana that leans a little more toward brown than yellow, and peel it on my way to the couch.
I open the laptop I left on my coffee table, unlock it, and as I eat my banana, I scroll through a local baby boutique’s website for anything else Ellie said she liked for the baby that they have in store.
I’d much rather spend tonight with Ellie on the swings, but if I can’t be with her, I’d like to do something for her.