Chapter 6 #2
Because they don't. They can't. Those losses are not public record.
They're not gossip. They're not part of the Austen Parks mythology or the family shareholder reports or the polished version of my life sold to strangers with souvenir cups and seasonal passes.
They are Chloe curled against my chest in a paper-thin hospital blanket.
They're her whispering, I’m sorry, until I wanted to tear the walls down with my hands.
They're me holding her and understanding for the first time that money's useless against certain kinds of pain.
Katrina lifts her chin. “I’m only saying what everyone's too polite to say.”
A sound leaves me. It might be a laugh if there were anything human left in it.
“No, you’re not.”
“Sebastian—”
“You're standing in my house, in a room my wife chose, talking about the children we lost as if they were a business problem.”
Her cheeks flush. “That’s not what I meant.”
“Then clarify.”
She exhales sharply. “Fine. Chloe’s body's apparently not the one you need to secure your line.”
For one suspended second, I see nothing.
Not Katrina. Not the room. Not the dark windows or the lamp or the sofa where Chloe fell asleep two winters ago with her head in my lap and my hand in her hair.
I see blood on white sheets. I see Chloe’s face turned toward the wall because she couldn't bear one more person telling her it was not her fault. I hear the doctor’s careful voice.
I hear myself promising her we'd be all right when I had no idea how to be anything.
My anger arrives late, but when it does, it arrives complete.
“Get out.”
Katrina’s eyes widen.
“Sebastian—”
“Get out of my house.”
“You’re angry because I’m right.”
I take one step toward her. Not enough to touch. Enough to make her understand that whatever fantasy she's built in her head's now standing in the wreckage of itself.
“You're not right about my wife. You're not right about my children. You're not right about me.”
“Your children?” she snaps. “There are no children.”
The words detonate. I don't think. I don't measure the force of what comes out of me. I don't hear the warning bells until the words are already in the room, tearing through everything I should've protected.
“Do you think that I wanted to have to hold my wife through three fucking miscarriages?” I demand. “Three times we lost our babies?! Yes, I fucking hated that! Is that what you want to hear?”
A gasp sounds behind me. Small. Broken.
The whole world stops.
I turn.
Chloe stands in the doorway between the foyer and the sitting room.
For half a second, my mind refuses her. She can't be here.
She can't have heard that. Not those words.
Not like that. Not from me, with Katrina standing in our house as if she belongs in the space my wife's been bleeding out of for months.
But she's here. Her coat's buttoned wrong, one side slightly higher than the other.
Her hair's loose around her face. In her right hand, she holds her wedding ring.
Held.
Her fingers open around it now like the metal's burned her. The devastation on her face is silent and absolute.
I've seen Chloe hurt. I've seen her frightened, embarrassed, angry, grieving. I've watched her smile through pain for the comfort of people who hadn't earned her grace. I've never seen this. This is not pain landing. This is trust dying in front of me.
“Chloe,” I say. My voice is wrecked.
Katrina makes a small movement behind me. I don't look at her. If the ceiling came down, I wouldn't look away from my wife.
Chloe’s eyes move past my shoulder for one brief second. To Katrina. To the woman standing in the sitting room like confirmation of every fear Chloe had tried to survive long enough to ask me about. When Chloe looks back at me, something in her's gone terribly still.
“I came to hear you out,” she says quietly.
I take a step toward her. “Chloe, no. That’s not?—”
She flinches. I stop as if she struck me.
Her gaze drops to the ring in her palm. The lamp catches it, a small circle of light in a room I've managed to make unbearable.
“I even thought about putting this back on after you returned it.” Her voice doesn't shake. That's worse. “Apparently, I made a mistake.”
“Please.” The word tears out before I can make it useful. “Please, listen to me. I didn't mean?—”
“I heard you.”
“No.” I shake my head once, uselessly. “You heard the worst possible part of a sentence that should've never been said to her.”
Her mouth trembles, but she controls it. God, she controls it. My wife stands there with her heart open on the floor between us, and still she gives me dignity I don't deserve.
She walks to the small table beside the foyer arch.
The table Chloe found in an antique shop three years ago, the one I said was impractical and then secretly had refinished because she kept running her fingers over the carved edge like it was already a member of the family.
She sets the ring down on it. Carefully. Not thrown. Not dropped. Placed.
The sound is almost nothing. It lands like a verdict.
“Chloe,” I say again, but I've already ruined her name tonight.
She looks at me once. There's love there. That's the worst of it. Under the shock, under the grief, under the humiliation of finding Katrina in our house and my anger wrapped around the most private losses of our life, there's still love.
And I've made that love unsafe.
She turns and walks out.