Chapter 29
One year earlier
Everything hurts. I can’t eat. I can’t sleep. I feel like I’ve lost a vital organ and am now being told I’ll have to figure out how to live the rest of my life without it.
Logically, I know she’s gone. I know she died from internal bleeding after the accident. I know I was driving but it wasn’t my fault, that we were hit by a drunk driver. And I know by the time we got to the emergency room, it was too late.
I know all of that, but it still doesn’t feel real. A part of me is still halfway expecting a text about the last Tessa Dare novel she consumed. Or a phone call in which she tells me about the cute guy she flirted with last night.
But she won’t.
And somewhere past the initial shock waves of hurt and grief is fear.
I’ve lived my whole life without a dad, but I’ve always had my mom.
She’s been there through everything. She is—was—my best friend, my confidant, my cheerleader.
The person who bought me my first Beverly Jenkins novel and stroked my hair when I found out David G.
was asking Amanda P. to the spring fling, not me.
She was the one who FaceTimed me with tears in her eyes after finishing my first book to tell me how proud of me she was.
And now that she’s gone, I don’t know how to do life without her.
I don’t know how to live without my vital organ.
I expect myself to mourn the big things. That she’ll never meet Liam’s and my children. That she won’t get to see Bella graduate from med school. That she’ll never see Henleigh, Jackson, or Riley grow up.
Instead, I find myself focused on the smaller things. Like that I’ll never hear her laugh again or drink overpriced iced coffees while we peruse stacks of romance novels in our local independent bookstore. I’ll never get to call her with good news or gossip over glasses of boxed wine on the porch.
Even just the other day I logged into Netflix to see that my mom had finally started watching Gilmore Girls on our account, and now I have to contend with the strange (almost comforting) reality that at least she’ll never get to see what a spoiled asshole Rory turns into.
It’s these fractured realizations that have me doubled over with the weight of the loss. Each one emerging with fresh pain, like finding out she’s gone all over again.
Liam’s grieving too. But instead of fragile emotions that can so easily tip from okay to not okay, Liam’s thrown himself into his work, spending nearly every night at the hospital or the research center. And when he is home, he gives me space. Lots of space.
He’d been on shift when the accident happened, so he was the first one to the emergency room.
The first one to hold me as I sobbed uncontrollably into his chest. The one who took me home from the hospital and immediately put the kettle on—the English equivalent of therapy. But since then, he’s been distant.
Perhaps naively, I thought that the death of my mom might bring us closer together.
That we would lean on each other in new and deeper ways.
I even wondered if maybe Liam would finally open up about his own family.
If tragedy might finally be the thing that broke the ice.
But in the weeks since her death, I feel even more disconnected from him, like we’re cohabitating strangers rather than husband and wife.
I can’t even remember the last time we had sex. Though it’s hard to say if that’s because he’s working so much, because grief has stifled my libido, or something else—something more permanent.
It’s just past midnight when Liam comes home from the research center to find me sitting in the living room with a book in my lap. Since her death I’ve been trying to reread her favorite authors, Lisa Kleypas and Judith McNaught, trying to find her somewhere in the pages of the stories she loved.
“I thought you’d be in bed,” Liam says, his tall frame casting a long shadow across the living room floor.
“Couldn’t sleep,” I tell him. “How was work?”
“It was okay.” Through the dim half-light of the hall, I see how tired he looks, like he’s being held together by a single thread. “How was your day?”
I think about my day spent roaming from the bed to the couch then back to bed in a depressive haze. How I ate stale cereal for dinner because I didn’t have the energy to cook.
“Not great,” I say honestly. “It’s been really hard.”
A dozen emotions scatter across his face: Concern. Pain. Fatigue. Then finally resignation. “Maybe you should talk to someone,” he says. “A therapist.”
I blink through the darkness, taken aback by his response. Or lack thereof.
I try to remind myself that these conversations are hard for Liam, that it’s not his fault, that he’s grieving too.
That he’s probably right. I should talk to someone.
But I wish it were he who would talk with me.
I wish it were he who could sit with me in this pain, not a stranger paid for by insurance.
“What about you?” I ask. “Can you talk with me?”
The muscles around his jaw tighten as he scratches the back of his neck. “I don’t think I’m good at talking about that kind of stuff.”
“Can you try?” I ask, my voice dipping into a plea.
He swallows, his eyes jumping away then finally back to me. “It’s really late,” he says. “I just got off a twenty-four-hour shift at the hospital and I’m not really in the headspace for that kind of conversation.”
My chest sinks. I want to be sympathetic and understanding of the fact that he likely spent all day working with patients who don’t have long to live, and he probably doesn’t want to talk about death right now.
That he’s exhausted and this has nothing to do with me.
But I can’t help the swell of disappointment rising in my throat, because it’s not just tonight that he’s not in the right headspace.
It’s that he’s never in the right headspace. And now I wish I hadn’t asked.
When I don’t respond, he turns and heads upstairs, leaving me in a silence so deafening, I can hear its echo in the increasing space between us.