Chapter 29
Twenty-Nine
“ I thought you were working tonight,” Mia said, like that might change the fact that Eric was standing in the living room rather than the hospital.
“When I saw you were back, I switched with Antoine,” he replied with infinite patience rather than calling her out for being a childish coward like she deserved. “I can’t say I’m thrilled to feel like I’m ambushing you in our home.” His kind face was lined with regret.
Mia took a long, slow breath. She wanted to be more prepared for this, to talk about things in a way that didn’t cause more damage to either of them. To run her messy thoughts by Marigold. But a critical realization hit her hard. There would never be a comfortable time to put a marriage to rest. To bury it along with all of the broken dreams and misplaced hope.
“I just didn’t know how else to?—”
“I know,” Mia whispered, irritated eyes stinging when she blinked for too long. “This is my fault.” She dropped her purse on the table and stepped inside.
Sitting on the couch, Mia tucked a leg under herself to face Eric. He sat close but not too close, looking at her like he was trying to figure out what had changed about her. A new haircut? A new shade of red?
“I looked for the divorce papers when I got back,” Mia said, because she didn’t know where the hell to start. She’d fallen out of practice after months of silence. After they’d dropped the D-word and broken apart, they’d never managed to come back together. Even as friends. “Do you want me to email your lawyer, or?—”
Eric shook his head, attention trained on his rubber clogs. She’d always hated those things, yet felt strangely sad that she wouldn’t see them anymore. “We can go over them later. They’re in the bedroom.”
Mia wanted to make a joke that he’d hidden them in the only place she wouldn’t check, but she couldn’t make her mouth move. A silence settled between them, heavy but not hostile. Just full. Full of everything they hadn’t said and everything they didn’t need to say anymore.
“I’m sorry,” Mia said finally, her voice low. “I’m sorry I broke this. That I broke us.” The sentiment was insufficient. Incomplete.
“You didn’t.” Eric scooted closer like he’d debated reaching out for her before thinking better of it. “We tried, Mia. We really did.”
Her throat tightened like her esophagus wanted to stop her from talking. “You were always so patient with me.” She put her hand to her abdomen and forced herself to look Eric in the face. She hadn’t asked Marigold how to put her feelings into words. “I just—I couldn’t stop trying to make it work.” She fisted her shirt like rending garments might help translate the aching pit in her gut into words. “Even after it stopped making sense.” She swallowed but it did nothing to improve her dry mouth. “And I can see that it was selfish. What it was doing to us was—” She shook her head. “I was just so sure that if I could succeed, then all the pain would have been worth it. But all I did was destroy everything.”
“You can’t put all of this blame on yourself.” Eric looked down at his hands as if gathering himself before looking at her with so much heartbreak in his eyes it was suffocating. “I’m sorry that I lost sight of you. That I put my head down and believed you would be right there when I looked up. That somehow everything would just…” He threw up his hands in the universal sign for helplessness. “Solve itself.”
“I wasn’t looking at you either,” Mia admitted, grimacing at how singularly focused on getting pregnant she’d been. How it had turned into something she wanted to the exclusion of everything else. And when she realized that meant losing her marriage, too… It was too late. “I was just so sure that a baby would fix it.”
Eric gazed at her with shame creeping into his expression. “I’m sorry that I got so frustrated with you. So angry.” He picked at his cuticles, his only nervous habit. “I wanted to move on. And I took that out on you.”
Since they were admitting terrible things, Mia didn’t hold back. “And I resented you for that,” she said for the first time to anyone. Even herself. “You went away and escaped into work and I couldn’t. It was my body, and I couldn’t get away from it. But I couldn’t stop wanting it.” Her limbs turned heavy with exhaustion. “I was so angry at you.”
Eric’s jaw flexed, but he didn’t argue. “Everything dies if you don’t feed it,” he said. “I should’ve thrown myself into you, not work.” He blinked hard. A single tear fell, then another. “I’m sorry we broke each other. In a million years, I would never have thought I could leave you alone with so much.” His voice shattered more than it cracked. “That I’d turn my back?—”
Mia reached for his hand, squeezed it once. Then, without thinking, she leaned forward and pulled him into a hug.
“We were doing what we could to survive, Eric. I’m just sorry that it cost us so much.”
They sat like that for a while, two people who had once loved each other. Who were ready to let go after a long-delayed postmortem.
“I really don’t mean to bombard you with all this stuff,” Eric said, words coming more easily. “But I’m assuming you’re going back to work soon and I don’t want you to be blindsided. It wasn’t my idea to make anything public, but?—”
“Eric, I think you said the beginning of that in your head.” She tried to smile, even though all she wanted to do was sign the divorce papers and crawl into bed.
“Yeah.” He blushed and scratched the back of his head.
From the sheepish look on his easy-to-read face, Mia guessed what he wasn’t saying. She picked up a throw pillow and tossed it at him playfully.
“Do you have someone?” Her nervous system was over the peaks and valleys and she laughed too loudly.
“I didn’t mean for it to happen.” He paled, Adam’s apple bobbing.
For a second, Mia waited for the pang—jealousy, regret, something. But it didn’t come. Instead, an unexpected calm bloomed in her chest, soft and steady. She cared that he was seeing someone, but only because she was happy for him.
“Spill,” she demanded.
When he was sure that Mia really wanted to know, Eric cautiously disclosed that he’d been dating an orthopedic surgeon for the last few months. He hadn’t intended to meet anyone, but they’d gotten stuck together in an elevator and couldn’t stop talking. The longer Eric talked about her, the more the light returned to his face, his eyes, his smile. It was a light Mia hadn’t seen in so long, she’d forgotten to miss it.
But the elevator.
“No one meets like that,” Mia said, laughing so hard she snorted, her hand flying to her mouth. “She sounds pretty great,” she quickly added, still grinning as she put her hand over his.
“Is that, like, your blessing?” Eric’s question was hesitant, like Mia might be luring him into a trap.
“Not that you need it, but yeah, I guess it is,” she agreed. “You’re an amazing human and you deserve more than anything to be happy. Life is so damn short, take what you can while you can.”
Eric leaned back, shoulders relaxed. “Are you seeing someone?”
Mia bought herself a few seconds to figure out how to respond. “Why are you asking?”
He chuckled, and it was nice to see his smile lines again. “You just seem different.” He tipped his head to one side as if to observe her from a different angle. “Good different,” he diagnosed.
Flooded with nerves at the thought of Tori, Mia’s flushed face answered before she could.
Eric replied with a bark of laughter. “Holy shit! You are!”
“Settle down.” Mia couldn’t control her grin.
“Anyone I know?” He wiggled his brows. “Ravi from oncology has always had such an obvious thing for you.”
“It’s no one from work,” she said because she was a wuss who couldn’t just spit out the truth.
Eric was even more amused. “Oh my God. Did you download a dating app? Were you terrified?”
“Jesus, no.” Mia picked at the metaphorical sticky bandage and ripped that sucker off with force, hair and skin and all. “It’s someone from Miami. Someone from school.”
Eric’s smile lines disappeared, only to be replaced by the elevens on his forehead. “From your all-girl’s school?” Then a lopsided grin. “Tori?” He chuckled, but less in delight and more in some kind of confirmation. “I always wondered.”
“Wondered what?” Mia snapped, surely even fucking Eric couldn’t have guessed that she and Tori had been more than friends. He’d never even met her!
“I actually kind of always expected you to come out to me as bi or pan, or something left of perfectly straight,” he continued, mostly to himself, without answering Mia’s question.
“What the hell does that mean?” Mia was shrieking, but her heart was too busy racing and her brain too busy making sense of all the things Eric wasn’t saying aloud for her to regulate her pitch and volume.
“It’s not like it’s a bad thing.” Eric lurched forward and took Mia’s hands again. “I’m so supportive of you no matter what?—”
“Eric, for fuck’s sake, just tell me why you think?—”
“Mia.” He gently stroked the back of her hand with his thumb, dragging Mia’s nervous system out of the red zone. “You’ve always talked about her like she was your first love.” His smile was soft and gaze softer, like he held both pity and love in the same space. “And I think maybe she was.”