28. Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Tyler
O ne week. She’d been gone for one week, and my heart was ragged, worn out, in desperate need of mending. If I didn’t have Victoria, I’d have dipped into the alcohol, succumbed to the haze. As it was, I was getting less and less sleep.
Each time I sank into unconsciousness, she visited, the sweetest torture. Sometimes, she was flirting, at the edge of the stage, a show just for me. Other times, we were lounging in bed, highlights of our pillow talk playing on a loop long enough to make me believe the dream might be real. Eventually, something would tip me off—an action, a word she wouldn’t use—and I’d be yanked out, woken up. I’d lay in bed, staring at the ceiling, so full of wishes I expected a genie or the devil to materialize so I could make a bargain for my heart to return.
When I fed Victoria and rocked her back to sleep, I saw Mia in every expression, every movement. Never before had I been this fulfilled and empty at the same time.
In some ways, her absence was an echo of something I experienced before. Unlike with Katie, I understood Mia’s conflict. Mia asked me not to call, not to text, not to reach out while the Kenny Connors trial stormed around her. She didn’t want me dragged into the turmoil .
I didn’t need to be dragged; I would have walked into the eye of the storm with her hand cradled in mine.
As it was, I’d lumbered through the week in a fog of sleepless nights and long days trying to figure out how to tend to a newborn. YouTube videos and frequent calls to my mother and Emily had gotten me by, but it was draining to juggle the baby, my shop, and my fraying feelings for Mia.
I’d thought I’d see her splashed across social media the day of her deposition, but somehow her team managed to keep her out of the press. Their ability to shelter her wasn’t that surprising. I knew from the tour how her core group circled her in times of need with Laura cracking the whip. Trust almost no one, and leaks of information were nearly impossible.
During the long nights, I often played Mia’s music or watched old interviews and tried to convince myself it was so Victoria would know her mother’s voice if she ever came back. I hated that her return was an “if” and not “when.”
The doorbell rang, and I had to readjust Victoria so I could keep the bottle propped in her mouth while I answered the door. She wailed if I removed it before she was done. Since Mia had given the warning about the paparazzi coming for me and Victoria, I never answered the door blind. On the other side, Katie had her medical bag slung over her shoulder, her scrubs fluttering in the light breeze.
I closed my eyes. It was Monday. How had I forgotten it was Monday? My gaze darted around the house, taking in the clear signs I wasn’t coping. Dishes in the sink. Clothes strewn over chairs. Burp cloths on almost every surface. The sour stench of soiled diapers from the garbage was a reminder that I wasn’t dumping the can frequently enough .
Most people might not notice the disorganization or put it down to the newborn learning curve, and maybe that was part of what was happening. My instinct was to run around hiding all the signs. But I suspected Katie still knew enough to see through any facade I tried to present. Even if I had the energy to pretend this week, I might not next time. Might as well face the music today.
Swinging open the door, I plastered a smile on my face. “Gotta be honest. I forgot you were coming.”
“It’s fine.” Katie waved me off. “I’m just coming to see how you’re getting along and to make sure Victoria is progressing. First babies are hard.” She slipped past into the house and stopped in the foyer. “Oh,” she said.
“Yeah. Like I said, I forgot.” I gave a nervous chuckle.
“Is Mia here?” She peered around me to the hallway, her long brown ponytail swaying. “Or any of the people she hired to cook and clean for you?”
So, she’d heard about that. As soon as Mia had started to show, she’d fired all of them, but for those first few weeks after Mia arrived, I’d appreciated the good food and clean house accomplished by someone else’s hard work. Although, I was perfectly capable of doing both…normally. “Uh, no. Um…she’s not here.”
“Oh, okay. That’s fine. You said you forgot, so perhaps she did as well. I can wait or come back.” Katie clenched her hands in front of her, and I was sure she was appalled by the mess. I was tidy, but Katie had been almost militant about order in the house. “I could…I could help you get a little more organized while we wait.”
“No.” I shook my head. “No.” I could picture how pissed off Mia would be to know Katie had offered, had felt I wasn’t capable. “I have to finish feeding her or she’ll scream bloody murder, but we don’t need to wait for Mia.”
Besides, we’d be waiting a hell of a long time.
“Right,” Katie said, setting down her bag and digging through it. “Have you been having any problems with feeding? Diaper rash? Questions about bowel movements?”
“No, everything has been great.” My voice was too bright, false.
She eyed the state of the house again but didn’t contradict me. “What about Mia? How is she coping?” After the briefest hesitation, she said, “Because I know you, Tyler, and this doesn’t look like you’re doing well. New baby and all, but your house is a disaster.”
“Yeah, the house is a disaster, but Victoria is fine. I’ll call that a win.”
“And Mia?”
“She’s fine, too.”
“She’s left town already?” With a sigh, Katie sank into the closest chair. “Why don’t you want to tell me?”
I hadn’t told anyone. Every time I called someone for help, I insisted I could handle things with a bit of direction over the phone. They assumed Mia and Pasha were still in the house, and we were learning to be a family. I hadn’t been able to correct them. Just the thought of uttering the words made the deadness inside spread. At some point, the sucking wound of her absence would be sewn up.
Perseverance. That was what this situation called for. Endurance.
“I’m sorry,” Katie said. “I know you really cared about her.”
I stared at her and thought about how inadequate her words were for the feelings eating at me. “I’m capable of coming out the other side. I know that already. ”
“Yeah.” She picked at the strap of her bag. “I guess you do. For what it’s worth, I’ve had a lot of regrets about what happened between us.”
“I haven’t had nearly enough sleep to have this conversation.” The last of the formula squeezed out of the bottle, and I pulled the nipple out of Victoria’s mouth before she could start sucking air. “I’m not in a very diplomatic mood.”
“I can take your blunt honesty, Tyler.”
“I would have liked some of that from you eight years ago.”
“Understandable. I was…I was too young to—I don’t know—comprehend what I was doing, what I was giving up.” Her hands twisted in her lap.
“For just over seven years, I probably would have been content to hear an explanation, something that made sense. But I don’t need one anymore.” I burped Victoria. A surge of triumph stormed through me that I’d made the task look so easy with Katie here. See? I was fine.
“I know you’ll need some time to adjust to a new normal. But I was hoping we could hang out a bit, get to know each other again.”
I stared at her, baffled. She still thought there was a chance for us?
“All right. Fuck it. Turns out I do need to know.” I set Victoria in the living room playpen. “You can’t disappear for eight years, and now that I’ve finally moved on, show up expecting things to go back to, quite frankly, what you left in the first place.”
“We were good together,” Katie whispered. She didn’t meet my gaze and was instead focused on Victoria through the mesh.
“You’re fucking right we were. But you left. You decided we weren’t something you wanted.”
“That’s not exactly what happened.”
“Clue me in. ”
“My parents don’t even know why I left…not really.” She twisted her ponytail around her finger and released it. “I was free-falling, and looking back, I don’t even know why. Well, I know why, but my feelings got out of control.”
Instead of sitting down, I paced the room, running my hands through my hair. “Spit it out, Katie. For months, you’ve been telling me you wanted to give me the truth. I’m listening, but I’m not going to be listening for long. I’m not even sure I care.” My thoughts had been so consumed by Mia that it was nice to care about something else for a change, even if it was only for a moment.
I didn’t know if Katie and I could find our way back to each other. Right now, I couldn’t imagine I’d even want that. With the way I felt about Mia, being with her was unthinkable. Mia’s name was scrawled across my life as though she’d autographed everything she touched while she was here, including my heart. Katie didn’t own even a tiny piece of my emotional landscape anymore. Mia had claimed it all.
“While you were gone on tour with that musical, I found out I wouldn’t ever be able to carry children.”
The admission stopped me in my tracks, and I slid down into the couch. “What? But—” That made no sense. “Why?”
“Apparently, I was born with a tiny uterus. The name of the medical condition is big and long and not particularly exciting. Being a mom meant a lot to me, so much to me.” Tears filled her eyes. She gestured toward Victoria. “I wanted a baby—your baby.”
I rubbed my index fingers along my eyebrows and tried to think through what she was saying. We’d been together long enough that kids, marriage, all of it had come up at some point. She’d wanted to be a nurse and a mother. For her, there’d been no question of whether we’d have kids, just when. “You can’t have kids?”
“It’s not quite that simple.” She scooped up her tears. “I mean, nowadays I could get a surrogate, probably, if I could afford it.” She took a deep, shaky breath. “We could have gotten a surrogate back then if we could have afforded it.”
Both our fathers had been doctors. My mother had worked part-time as a lawyer. “We could have found a way to afford it.”
“Probably, yeah.” Katie sniffed. “But the news, well, it put me in a tailspin. We’d always talked about having kids. The thought of never having that, of denying you that, I just…I couldn’t get my head wrapped around it.” She made a winding motion with her finger at her temple. “The more I thought about it, the more determined I was to give you a chance at finding that with someone else.”
All of her words were landing, but I couldn’t get any of them to stick. I wouldn’t have been able to leave the way she did. There was too much fight in me. If she’d said something, I’d have argued with her, tried to make her see sense, told her none of it mattered if we were together. The time for that was long gone.
My conversation with Emily months ago resurfaced. She’d said she hadn’t loved her high school boyfriend enough to make it work. And Katie hadn’t loved me enough to make our relationship work.
Maybe Mia didn’t either. But she’d been honest and up front about her issues. I’d never questioned her honesty, even when it hadn’t been what I’d wanted to hear.
“You hid your diagnosis from me.”
“I hid it from everyone.” She wiped her eyes. “Well, I hid it from everyone here . Every boyfriend after you got the ‘I don’t want kids’ speech. I convinced myself I didn’t want them. Can’t have them. Don’t want them.” A bitter chuckle escaped her lips.
She’d always been stubborn. That quality was the one thing I’d seen and believed about her departure. Once she decided she was leaving, there hadn’t been anything I could do to persuade her to stay.
“Then I got drunk with a friend back in October and told her the whole story of us. She convinced me to look you up on social media. Everything said you were single, and Mom said she had heard you weren’t seeing anyone. So, I applied for a job back here. A lateral step, not even a promotion. On a whim. Just like that. I got here and you were seeing Danai, but then you asked Dad to help with the Mia situation. My return, your baby—the family we once planned together. It felt like fate.”
Wow. The word bounced around my head, and I rubbed my face. “Fate?” I asked, squinting at her. Exhaustion and annoyance went to war for dominance. “You thought you’d show up and snatch me back like a lost toy? I don’t know what happened to you eight years ago. I know what you’re telling me now, but something doesn’t quite add up for me. You know what I think it is? Eight years ago, you didn’t know how good we had it. We were young. Our relationship was all we’d ever really known. You go out and see other things and then you decide, oh hey, that guy back home wasn’t so bad after all .”
“I always knew how good we had it.”
“But you left. You threw us away. For a long time, I let myself be lost. I chose relationships I knew weren’t quite right for me. I see that now.”
“We can get back what we had. All the pieces are here. ”
“We can’t. We really can’t. Maybe a year ago we could have tried, even nine months ago. But now? I…I can’t go back. I want something else now. A different life.”
“With her? But she left, Tyler. She did the same thing as me. Except she’s left a baby behind. A baby. I’d never leave my child.”
Mia left because she needed to go. Katie chose to leave. Mia had to go. “There’s a lot you don’t know.”
“You’d give her a second chance, but not me?”
“If she stays away for eight years, her window might be closed too.” I rose from my seat. “But I know for sure yours is sealed shut. Too much has happened.” I shoved my hands into my pockets. “I’m sorry you can’t have kids. I’m sorry you didn’t tell me eight years ago or any of the years in between. It’s too late for us.”
In my pocket, my phone started to chime with email notifications. More online orders for the thrift store, probably. “You can either ask your dad to assign another nurse to me, or I can. But I don’t want to make this harder on you than it needs to be.” Without Mia as a barrier, I didn’t want more of these conversations either. Whatever had been between us years ago had died off—love untended.
“I’ll talk to him.” She wiped at more tears as they slid down her cheeks.
Strange that Mia’s tears made my heart clench and my chest ache, but I felt almost nothing at the sight of Katie’s. I crossed to the door, and she eased her bag back onto her shoulder. When I opened the front entrance, Katie’s hand rested on my shoulder, and then, on her toes, she kissed my cheek.
A cacophony of slamming car doors and scattered conversation hit me at the same moment the flashbulbs went off. Outside, news vans lined the street. Seemed impossible, but I’d missed their arrival. All week, I’d been so careful. The noise of the press echoed into the house, and Victoria put the lungs she’d inherited from her mother to work, screaming in rage at the disturbance.
Katie’s hand stayed on my arm; her body positioned too close.
Far, far too close.
My heart pounded. For a moment, I didn’t move, stunned by the booming chaos.
Well, rock bottom, here I come.