37. Love in the Dark #3
The moment the words left my mouth, I wanted to claw them back. But they were true. Or at least, they felt true in the way truth feels when you’re breaking down—frightening, premature, but impossible to deny.
I fold forward, elbows on my knees, pressing my fingertips into my temples. I want to cry. I can feel the pressure of it building behind my eyes, but the tears don’t fall. They’re stuck somewhere deeper, waiting for a moment when I’m not holding myself together by a thread.
I hear the soft hum of traffic outside, a dog barking in the distance, the refrigerator kicking on. The normal sounds of life continuing. Moving. Breathing. Even when I feel like I’m frozen in place. My phone buzzes once at the edge of the couch.
I don’t jump or rush. I stare at it for a long time before picking it up, the screen lighting my face. It’s not Reid. It’s Mom.
You awake, baby?
I let out a slow breath. She doesn’t call or text unless she feels something. Somehow, she always knows the exact hour my heart tilts too far in the wrong direction.
Yeah. Just thinking.
Seconds later, my phone rings. I almost ignore it. I don’t want to talk. I don’t want to hear the worry in her voice. I don’t want the “I told you marriage was hard” speech—not because she’s wrong, but because she’s right. Too right.
But I answer anyway.
“Hi,” I say softly.
Her voice comes through quiet, warm. “Hi, sweetheart. Can’t sleep?”
“I don’t know if I even tried.”
A beat of silence, then: “Rough day?”
I swallow the laugh that wants to come out—bitter, thin. “Rough month. Rough… everything.”
“Honey,” she says gently, “you don’t have to explain it all at once.”
I close my eyes. “Mom,” I whisper, “I think Reid and I are… I don’t know. I don’t know what we are right now.”
She doesn’t gasp. Doesn’t scold. Doesn’t jump in with all the warnings she gave me before. She just lets the silence breathe for a moment, then says, “Talk to me.”
So I do. Not the whole story. Not the blow-by-blow.
Just the pieces I can hold without breaking apart—how tired we both are, how every conversation feels heavier than the one before, how love hasn’t disappeared but has started feeling buried under layers of exhaustion neither of us were prepared for.
When I finish, her voice is so soft it nearly breaks me.
“Marriage isn’t easy, baby. It’s especially hard when you’re both still becoming who you’re going to be.”
My throat tightens. “What if we’re becoming people who don’t fit together anymore?”
“You don’t know that,” she says gently. “Not tonight. Not in the middle of hurt. You’re scared. He’s scared. Fear talks louder than love when you’re tired.”
I press my fingers to my eyes. “I don’t want to lose him.”
“And you don’t want to lose yourself either,” she says. “Both can be true.”
The tears finally come—quiet, slow, the kind that feel like they’re leaking out of places deeper than my eyes. “I feel like I’m failing him,” I whisper.
“No,” she says. Firm. Certain. “You’re both drowning in different ways. Drowning isn’t failing.”
I nod even though she can’t see it. “I don’t know how to fix this.”
“You don’t fix it tonight,” she says. “You breathe tonight. You rest tonight. Tomorrow you try again. Marriage is a thousand tiny choices to keep trying.”
I wipe my face. “What if he stops choosing me?”
A long exhale. Not surprised—just sympathetic. “Then you’ll face that when it comes. But right now? You haven’t lost each other. You’re lost in the struggle.”
I sit there, letting her words settle, letting the calm she always seems to bring sink into my bones. We talk for a few more minutes—about Liam, about work, about nothing heavy. Then she tells me she loves me and hangs up. The apartment feels quieter again, but not as suffocating.
I set the phone down and look around the room. The couch. The toys. The framed photos on the shelf. The air that still smells faintly like the lavender spray I use when nights feel too heavy. Our home. Our life. Not perfect. Not simple. Not easy. But real.
I pull the blanket tighter around my shoulders and curl against the arm of the couch. My mind wanders to the question I didn’t say out loud to my mom. The one that has been sitting in the deepest part of me since the moment I ended the call earlier: What if loving each other isn’t enough anymore?
The moment the thought forms, I feel it—fear. Cold, immediate, blooming across my chest in a thin, paralyzing line. I close my eyes, breathe slow, breathe deep, trying to push the worst of it back. But the fear doesn’t leave. It lingers, quiet and patient.
Because for the first time, I’m not asking it in a moment of anger or exhaustion.
I’m asking it in stillness. In truth. In darkness.
I sink deeper into the cushions, staring at nothing, letting the weight of everything settle.
And the chapter inside me closes with a single, devastating thought: What if we made a mistake?
Not loudly. Not angrily. Just softly. Deeply. Honestly. The kind of question that doesn’t disappear in the morning. The kind that marks the beginning of the darkest part of a marriage.