Sunny #2
But she felt the lie between them, sensed his withdrawal like a physical presence at the table. Was this how he had coped after Kate died? Building walls, retreating into work and routine while his heart calcified around the pain?
Tonight’s bedtime routine stretched longer than usual, with both girls seemingly reluctant to settle. Hailey insisted on three stories instead of her usual one, while Maddie lingered in the bathroom, brushing her teeth with methodical slowness.
“Are you sick?” she finally asked Sunny directly, those penetrating blue eyes — so like Liam’s — searching her face. “You look really sad.”
Sunny’s heart clenched. “I’m just tired, sweetie. It’s been a long day.”
“Are you going to be okay?” Maddie pressed, displaying that uncanny perception that sometimes made her seem older than her years.
“Yes,” Sunny answered, pulling her into a hug and holding on slightly too long. “I promise.”
It was a promise she wasn’t sure she could keep, but Maddie needed to hear it.
Later, lying beside Liam in the darkness of her bedroom, Sunny stared at the ceiling, exhaustion pulling at her body while her mind remained brutally alert.
Though Liam lay less than a foot away, he might as well have been in another hemisphere.
His breathing wasn’t the deep rhythm of sleep, but he made no move to bridge the gap between them.
Sunny reached across the cool sheets, finding his hand in the darkness. His fingers briefly tightened around hers, a momentary connection that gave her hope. But then, almost imperceptibly, his grip loosened, hand sliding away as he turned onto his side, facing away from her.
The rejection, however slight, cut through her like a blade. This morning, they had been planning a future together — marriage, family, forever. Now, in the span of a single day, that future seemed to be crumbling around her, and she didn’t know how to stop it.
Sunny curled onto her side, arms wrapped protectively around her empty womb, and let silent hot tears soak into her pillow. Beside her, Liam’s shoulders rose and fell in the pattern of someone trying very hard to pretend they were asleep.
When morning came, Sunny woke alone, the sheets beside her cold. A note on the nightstand explained in Liam’s angular handwriting: Emergency team meeting. Didn’t want to wake you. L.
She traced her fingers over the letters, noting the absence of any endearment, any acknowledgment of yesterday’s loss. It was as if he had compartmentalized their grief along with everything else, tucking it away in a box too painful to open.
Beth arrived early again, her kind eyes full of sympathy that made Sunny want to scream. She couldn’t bear pity today — not when she was barely holding herself together.
“I can handle things,” Sunny insisted, though her body still ached and her heart felt shattered. “The girls need normalcy.”
“They need you to rest,” Beth countered gently. “You’ve been through something terrible.”
You have no idea, Sunny thought, though she appreciated the older woman’s concern. How could Beth — how could anyone — understand the particular devastation of losing a child who had existed only in blood tests and whispered plans?
Beth hesitated, then set down the stack of folded towels she’d been holding. She pulled out a chair at the kitchen table and sat, her weathered hands coming to rest on the polished wood.
“I lost one, too,” she said quietly, her voice steady but soft. “My first. Almost forty years ago now.”
Sunny paused, caught off guard by this unexpected revelation from the usually private housekeeper.
“I was three months along. Far enough to have started dreaming, not far enough for anyone else to think it mattered much.” Beth smoothed an invisible wrinkle from the tablecloth. “My husband and I never told a soul. Back then, you just… didn’t talk about such things.”
Sunny sank into the chair opposite her. “How did you get through it?”
Beth’s eyes were clear, unclouded by tears but deep with remembered pain. “Not gracefully, I’ll tell you that. I spent three days in bed. Then I got up because I had to. Because life doesn’t stop, even when you think it should.”
She reached across the table, her warm hand covering Sunny’s cold one. “The hole never completely closes. But you learn to carry it differently as time passes.”
It wasn’t false reassurance or empty platitudes. It was just truth, offered without expectation — the simple acknowledgment that Sunny wasn’t alone in this particular pain, that others had walked this path before her.
“Thank you,” Sunny whispered, turning her palm up to squeeze Beth’s hand. “For telling me.”
Beth nodded, standing with quiet dignity. This moment of connection didn’t heal Sunny’s grief, but it anchored her somehow, providing a tiny handhold in the slippery descent of loss. Someone else understood. Someone else had survived.
After the girls left for school, the house echoed with silence. Sunny drifted from room to room, unable to settle, unable to rest despite her exhaustion. In the bathroom, she found herself opening the cabinet, reaching for the pregnancy test she’d hidden in the back of the drawer.
The plastic stick felt impossibly small in her hand — such a tiny object to have contained so much hope. The two pink lines still visible in the result window now seemed like a cruel joke, a promise broken before it could be fulfilled.
Sunny closed her eyes, allowing herself to indulge, just for a moment, in the fantasy of what might have been. A nursery decorated in soft yellows and greens. Liam’s large hands cradling a tiny swaddled form. The girls cooing over their new sibling. The five of them, a complete family.
The fantasy dissolved, replaced by the cold reality of loss. Sunny replaced the test in the cabinet, unable to discard it yet, but unwilling to torture herself by keeping it in view.
Passing Liam’s study on her way back to the bedroom, Sunny paused at the partially open door. She could see him sitting at his desk, head in his hands. He hadn’t gone to a team meeting after all. He was just…hiding. From her. From their shared pain.
As she watched, he reached for a silver frame on his desk — one of the many photos of Kate that still adorned the house. His thumb traced the edge of the image with such tender reverence that Sunny felt like an intruder witnessing something deeply private.
Sunny backed away silently, not wanting him to know she had seen. The distance between them, which had begun as a hairline crack the night before, now stretched wide as a canyon. She didn’t know how to bridge it, or if Liam even wanted to even try.