Chapter 19
Chapter Nineteen
I pressed the key fob for my little red Miata and it came to life, and for a moment I just stood there looking at my baby, but seeing nothing.
My therapist Kate had kept insisting it was normal to grieve.
That grief wasn’t weakness, it was truth.
That I was allowed to cry. I had practically run out of our session.
Sure, I was allowed to cry.
Allowed didn’t mean I wanted to.
I pressed my lips into a thin line, willing myself not to break down in the parking lot like a woman who’d lost her mind.
I could fall apart inside my apartment like a civilized adult.
I could put on pajamas, make a cup of tea, sob into a blanket, like an appropriate Victorian Miss on Netflix.
Just not here. Not in the sunlight. Not where people could see.
I slid into the low leather seat and pulled the door closed. The familiar scent of my car wrapped around me—old coffee, charcoal from a million art supply runs, the faint strawberry lip balm I always lost somewhere in the center console.
I started the car. The engine hummed. My eyes stayed dry. Only my hands shook.
The drive home was muscle memory. Turns I’d taken a thousand times, traffic lights I barely noticed. My brain had apparently tapped out ten minutes into the drive, because the next thing I knew I was inside, standing in my living room with my purse on the floor and my shoes still on.
Then I blinked, and I was on my couch.
And my phone was in my hands.
Like it had appeared there by divine intervention. Or desperate instinct.
The screen illuminated my face. I stared at it, waiting for it to tell me what to do. Waiting for it to give me instructions. Waiting for it to save me, like Kate hadn’t been able to.
I frowned.
A drop of water fell onto the glass.
What the hell?
Then another.
My chest clenched and my nose prickled.
Tears. I watched them land with the kind of fascination normally reserved for eclipses. Then another tear fell. And another. I wondered if my phone was waterproof. I couldn’t remember if I’d bought the waterproof model. I wiped the screen with the heel of my hand, but the tears just kept coming.
More fell.
More fell.
More fell.
“Chloe?”
I froze.
“Chloe?”
The voice came again, urgent now.
I hadn’t even realized I’d pressed her number. Hell, I didn’t remember unlocking the phone.
“Chloe? Answer me. I can hear you breathing, Honey.”
Trenda.
My mind dragged itself through the fog.
“Trenda?” I croaked. My voice sounded wrong. Too thin. Too scraped out.
“Yeah,” she said, gentle and alert at the same time, like she was talking Bella out of a full-blown tantrum. “What’s wrong?”
I tried to think. Tried to organize language. Nothing happened. Thoughts slipped away.
“Chloe, you’re scaring me,” she said. “Talk to me.”
My throat spasmed. I looked around the room as if I’d find the explanation taped to the wall. The room blurred.
“Trenda?” I whispered. “It hurts.”
Her voice sharpened. “What hurts? Did you have an accident? Did you hurt yourself? Hang up. I’ll call 9-1-1.”
“No,” I whispered, shaking my head even though she couldn’t see it. “Insss…inside.” My tongue thickened. “It hurts inside.”
I shuddered, my arm wrapping around my middle. Lower, around my barren womb.
“I can’t have babies. I’ll never have a baby. No Bella. No Drake.” My nose clogged, breath catching in broken little gasps. “No…nobody.”
Was that my voice? That wrecked, empty sound? It didn’t feel like it belonged to me.
Silence pulsed through the phone.
Then, “Where are you? Are you at the house in Jasper Creek? Is Zarek with you?”
I shook my head. Remembering holding little Drake. His eyes looking up, his body solid in my arms, and his baby smell of talcum and baby shampoo.
“Chloe, answer me. Are you at your apartment?”
“Yes,” I breathed. The word was tiny. Like it didn’t matter. Like I didn’t.
“Hold on, baby girl,” she said. “I’m coming.”
“Don’t,” I whispered. “I’m fine.”
I’m fine.
God.
How many years had I said that?
When I couldn’t get out of bed—I’m fine.
When I forgot how to eat for three days—I’m fine.
When Zarek found me sitting on the kitchen floor bleeding from a shattered glass—I’m fine.
It was a shield. A lie. A fucking survival mantra I didn’t know how to quit.
“Chloe, don’t hang up,” Trenda said. I heard the scrape of keys, the slam of a door, the roar of an ignition. “I’m already in my car. Just talk to me. Honey, please. Talk to me.”
Talk.
What an impossible ask.
How do you talk when grief feels like a fist stuffed down your throat? How do you talk when the future you’d built entire years around—when the nursery you’d chosen paint colors for—when the names you’d whispered into the dark—
How do you talk when that future has been set on fire and nobody sees the smoke but you?
Another sob ripped through my chest, harsh and animal.
“It’s not fair,” I hissed, tears streaming hot and relentless. “I did everything they told me to. I took the vitamins. I ate the stupid kale. I stopped drinking coffee. I prayed. I bargained. I begged. And it didn’t matter. None of it mattered, Trenda. I’m broken inside.”
My vision tunneled. “I won’t get to hold a baby that has my smile or Zarek’s eyes. I won’t get to braid hair or pack lunches or stand at graduations. There won’t be cousins. There won’t be Christmas mornings with a pile of kids sleeping on the floor. There won’t be—”
My voice shattered. “There won’t even be Zarek. There won’t be…anything.”
All the tiny futures I’d imagined flickered like dying stars in my mind—Bella bossing my kids around, little boys learning how to be sneaky from Evie’s kids, the swarm of Avery children growing like a forest around my sister’s kids.
And me and Zarek.
Always in the center of that chaos. Always holding each other’s hands. Always part of something bigger than just the two of us.
That was gone now.
“Chloe,” Trenda said, voice wet. “Baby—I need you to keep talking to me,” she begged.
“I’m fine,” I rasped again, because I didn’t know any other response. “I’m always fine. Zarek’s the one in trouble.”
There was a long beat of silence. Then very softly, “it’s okay not to be fine. It’s okay to break.”
Her permission undid something in me—some internal stitch I’d yanked tight for years.
My breath stuttered. My throat burned. I fumbled with the phone, vision blurred, nerves shredding.
“I need to go,” I whispered, and before I could talk myself out of it, I hit the red button.
The call disconnected. The phone slipped from my hand and thudded onto the rug.
Silence rushed in.
No sisters. No therapist. No husband. No audience.
Just me.
And the truth.
I curled onto my side, arms wrapped tight around my middle, knees pulled up like I could hold myself together by compressing all the fragments.
The grief came in waves. Not quiet ones. Not cinematic. It came like a storm—ugly, choking, heaving. I gasped for breath and fought for air and tried to remember how to exist inside a body that didn’t match the dreams I’d poured into it.
My chest hurt. My ribs hurt. My face hurt. But I couldn’t stop the tears. The sobs.
I didn’t know how long I stayed that way—minutes, hours, a small eternity—before a sound cut through the quiet.
A knock.
Knuckles against wood.
Firm.
Then again.
A little louder.
And again.
“Open up, baby girl.”
I wiped my face with the back of my hand.
Then I stood.
And I unlocked the door.