Chapter 13
Jackson
“She looked better today.” My fingers tighten around my takeout paper cup in my therapist's office, the memory of Ellary standing behind the coffee shop counter fresh in my mind.
She’d been laughing when I pushed the door open and walked in. I haven’t heard her laugh like that in so fucking long.
And the pale skin, the wan face, and her weight loss felt like a distant nightmare. She’d recovered from whatever sickness had struck her weeks ago. She’d been glowing.
I’ve never seen her so beautiful.
Maybe it’s just in my head. Maybe she’s always been that beautiful, but she was radiant, her grin wide, her chestnut-brown hair glossy, and her brown eyes sparkling with happiness.
Until she saw me, that is.
Then her smile had dimmed, and she’d muttered something to the red-headed barista about getting something from the back. And she’d walked away without another look my way. I deserve it. I know I deserve it, but that doesn’t mean her rejection didn’t hurt.
“You don’t sound pleased about it,” Lynn says, her voice pulling me out of my moroseness.
I sigh. “No. I’m happy she’s better. Glad she’s smiling and looking good.”
Lynn studies me with interest. “But?”
“I wanted her to need me,” I quietly admit. “I thought if she were sick, I could take care of her. Maybe take her soup and do all the things I used to do for her when she was sick before.”
“And why would you want to do that?”
My eyes return to my barely touched coffee. “So she could need me again the way I need her.”
“And instead?”
God talking to Lynn is like someone pulling the words out of my head. I tell her just enough sometimes, hold a few words back, and she always knows.
“She doesn’t need me. She’s working at the coffee shop, and she looks amazing.
I see her laughing with the women there, and when I check our shared checking account, she’s not using any of our money.
If I hadn’t set up auto-pay for the mortgage and the other bills, she’d be taking care of them herself, even if it meant she struggled to pay them all because she can’t be earning much working part-time at a coffee shop.
” I let out a frustrated, agonized exhalation.
“She’s moved on with her life, and I just want her to miss me the way I miss her. ”
She consumes all my thoughts. The ones not taken up by regret and guilt, that is.
“Jackson?”
The new note in my therapist's voice yanks my attention upward. “Yeah?”
Lynn folds her hands together. “We’ve been doing these sessions for several weeks now, twice a week, and while I’m pleased by how willing you’ve been to open up and do the work, I’m concerned.”
My back stiffens. “About Ellary?”
“About you. When was the last time you did something for yourself? Something that focuses on the future and not Ellary.”
“But I love Ellary.”
She gives me a gentle smile. “And I’m not saying you shouldn’t or that you can’t, but life is more than your romantic partner. When was the last time you did something related to hockey?”
I shake my head. “I don’t know.”
Her raised eyebrow calls me a liar.
My shoulders slump. “Not since I left the NHL. You think I should do something related to hockey.”
I stopped watching it for a while. It was too painful when I was a sales manager for an independent logistics company. I resented the men on the ice, living out their dreams, when mine had crashed and burned barely before I could enjoy it after all the hard work I’d put in to get me there.
“I think you should do something you enjoy. Something that challenges you, or even that you find fun. Something that fills the hole that turning your back on a career and a hobby you spent much of your childhood and young adulthood loving. Being a well-rounded individual doesn’t just benefit Ellary.
It benefits the community, your friends, your family, and you.
You stop looking at others to make you feel a specific way.
That’s important. Think about it before our next session. ”
“Okay.”
She glances at her diary. “I’d like to reduce our sessions from two weeks to one week. How does that sound?”
A slight skitter of panic runs down my spine. What if I fall back into bad habits? What if my life implodes again without Lynn there to stop me from doing something stupid?
“If you think I’m ready,” I say hesitantly.
She smiles. “I do. What day works best for you?”
“Thursday.” I tell her the day that I know Ellary usually works in the coffee shop and get up to leave.
“And enjoy your weekend, Jackson,” Lynn says with a smile as she closes her notebook and sets it down on the coffee table. “Life is for living. Do something fun.”
I smile. “I’ll do that.”
Melton isn’t a big town. With fewer than thirty thousand residents and not many grocery stores, I was bound to run into Ellie eventually.
Before, I was living in a motel, subsisting on takeout and gulping down whiskey. Now I have an apartment—one I’ve had for a few weeks now, and as Lynn likes to say, no longer self-medicating with whiskey.
It’s nothing special. Just a basic one-bedroom, fully furnished, that’s a little too clinical with all its glass and stainless steel for my liking.
But it’s better than a motel, and it’s closer to work, so I took on the six-month lease and told myself when it was up, I’d find something better while secretly hoping I’d have convinced Ellie to give me another chance.
We used to go to the grocery store together.
Early on a Saturday, she’d gather her collection of mismatched reusable shopping bags from the trunk of her car and stuff them in the cart I’d grab for her.
I’d grumble and complain that shopping with the whole town crammed in the aisles was a fate worse than death.
But secretly, I liked it.
Liked finding a reason to wrap my arm around her waist and move her away from someone passing down our aisle while she was focused on which rice or pasta to grab.
I’d keep hold of her for a little longer, nuzzle her throat, and grin at her flushed cheeks. She would nudge me away with a look in her eyes that said she liked what I was doing more than she should in public.
We’d wind our way through the store. I’d push the cart. She’d wander off at tangents, coming back with armloads of groceries. I’d shake my head, take it from her, and dump everything into the cart, telling her to get me to help instead of carrying so much on her own.
She was always so concerned with taking care of me, with getting the things I liked best that I wasn’t taking as much care of her needs and her wants. It was yet another facet of our lives together where I didn’t appreciate my wife and all she did for me as well as I should have.
Until it was too late.
With a basket of shopping instead of a cart, since it’s just me to buy for, and I’ve never been fond of cooking, I’m passing the pasta aisle to reach the frozen dinners when a pale yellow sundress catches my eye.
Ellie has one just like that.
So I turn.
A petite woman with dark brown hair clipped at the back of her head stretches on her tiptoes to reach a box of pasta on the top shelf.
I smile.
Ellie.
She always liked the pasta on the shelf, too high to reach.
I start toward her, hoping to surprise her. Maybe we can talk for a while. My gaze slides down the outline of her body through the thin yellow cotton dress.
Her breasts are fuller and rounder than I remember. They were always a nice handful, not too big, not too small, and she always made the most arousing, breathy moan when I sucked her nipples in bed.
My gaze continues downward, and I jerk to a stop, the sound of my pounding heart filling my head as my eyes lock onto a belly more rounded than it’s ever been.
I’ve seen Kate, my best friend Wade’s twice-pregnant wife, often enough over the years to know a pregnant woman when I see one.
Ellie’s belly is rounded. Not a full bump yet, but it’s getting there. At least a couple of months, if not a little more.
She’s pregnant.
Ellie is pregnant.
“Excuse me?” A woman bumps the back of my leg with her shopping cart.
I turn and quickly walk away, set my basket on the floor near the grocery store entrance, and keep going. Out across the parking lot and toward my car. My heart is a drumbeat filling my head and sweat pops up all over my skin.
My hand shakes as I fish my keys out of my pocket.
I unlock my car, get in, slam the door shut, and stare straight ahead, seeing nothing. Feeling everything.
A question I could never answer suddenly makes sense.
Ellie rarely called me when I was at work. She never wanted to interrupt me when I was working. But that day, one that feels like a lifetime ago, she’d called me three times and texted me once, asking if we could talk.
I was too focused on getting my dick sucked by my assistant that I’d turned my phone to silent and didn’t see her text.
She’d been coming to tell me something. It had to have been so important that she couldn’t wait until I got home from work. Something life-changing.
Like the baby we had been trying to conceive for six years.
I could have sworn when I opened my eyes and saw my wife staring at me, horrified from my office door, that she’d been slipping something into her bag.
What had it been?
A pregnancy test?
Had she come to tell me that she was pregnant and we were finally having the child we’d been hoping for?
I don’t know how long I sit in my car, my hands wrapped around the wheel, barely able to move. Stunned. Terrified. Excited.
I want to run into the grocery store, wrap my arms around my pregnant wife, spin her around, and grin at her as we talk about a nursery and appointments, planning a new life with a child in it.
But she didn’t tell me.
She knew—she had to have known all this time—and she’s seen me at the coffee shop often enough, but she didn’t want me to know. She’s been pressing on with this divorce anyway, knowing she was pregnant with my child.
What I did to her left scars that might never heal. I might eventually convince her that I’m sorry, that I regret it with my whole heart. But what she saw… no amount of going to therapy or being a better person can wipe that image from her mind.
Nothing can.