Chapter 15
Present Day
For all the years I’ve held onto that secret, and this is not how I envisioned telling Grant.
That day lives on repeat in my mind, not just the shooting, but the moment I realized I had lost a baby I never really got to celebrate. The fact that I lost a piece of myself and Grant already gets cemented as a horrific day in my heart, coupled with the fact that it was the most traumatizing day of my life. I can still feel the heartbreak that coursed through me when the paramedic noticed the blood on the floor.
At first, I wasn’t able to decipher what was happening. I was so lost in grief with Artie passing away in my arms that I wasn’t registering the magnitude of my own personal loss. When I got to the hospital, it was confirmed I had lost the baby. Before my family arrived from Nebraska, I was seen by staff at the local hospital near campus. I let the staff know this baby wasn’t something I had announced to anyone yet.
My family had thought I was there for observation for what I had endured and witnessed, but in reality, the staff wanted to make sure I was not heavily bleeding following the miscarriage. They didn’t put me on the maternity floor since everyone on that floor was welcoming life while I was mourning it.
In addition to my personal loss of the baby, I was mourning the loss of my dear friend, Artie. My friend, who sacrificed his own safety to save me, knowing I was pregnant with Grant”s baby. I couldn’t handle the depth of my sadness at that point. I retreated into myself and had no idea how to verbalize my emotions.
The only person who knew about my miscarriage was Evelyn once I moved to the city. My therapy sessions were filled with tears from not only watching my friend die in my arms but the reality that my baby would never take a breath. That took many sessions to process, and it was draining, to say the least.
Much like she was doing months ago on our virtual session, Evelyn has been urging me to tell Grant about the loss. But I honestly never found a good time. When I started to pull myself out of my stupor, I wanted to focus on my future, not my past. I wanted to find meaning in what my life looked like now, not how the impact of that day catapulted me into a different dimension of the life I had envisioned.
Plus, the better I did, the more weight I saw Grant lose off his shoulders. My recovery reflected in Grant”s demeanor, even if he didn”t mean for that to happen. The longer I went without telling him, the more I convinced myself it was better for him to live without this pain I”d carried for both of us.
For so long, I tried to find love somewhere else, in someone else’s arms, but it never felt right. Then, when Grant and I reconnected intimately in Malibu, I couldn’t fight the attraction any longer.
Maybe I was wrong in keeping this to myself, but I didn’t see what Grant would gain from knowing. It’s selfish; I know that now. By the look on his face, I can almost say with absolute certainty that I had judged this entire thing incorrectly.
“I’m sorry, what?” he asks, his voice no more than a whisper.
I look down. I can’t look at him. I feel the guilt mounting in my chest from how horribly I misjudged this entire situation. I saw everything as my pain and mine alone to bear.
“I was pregnant that day I called you. The day of the shooting.” Tears are falling down my cheeks, and I feel like my entire body is going to crumble.
There is a very likely chance we won”t recover from this. Forgiveness might not be possible for him and I don”t know how I”ll cope with that loss on top of everything else my heart has endured.
He’s got a look of utter devastation. The weight of the silence between us is consuming me, so I repeat myself in case the words aren’t registering for him.
“The day of the shooting, that’s why I said I had to talk to you.”
He’s nodding, absorbing my words, until he finally speaks. “Yeah, I heard that part already. I missed the part regarding why you didn’t tell me this when it happened?” He’s calm, but I can feel the tension radiating off his body.
There’s barely anyone out right now. The cold streets are quiet, but even if there was a crowd moving along this path we are standing on, I think nothing could take away my focus from the look of utter heartbreak I see on Grant’s face.
It feels like we are the only two human beings here, standing in New York, our hearts being ripped out in ways I never thought possible. I thought I had already lived through my hardest day, but it seems this one is a close second, and it’s one I could have avoided had I just taken Evelyn’s advice and been honest.
“I just didn’t know how to handle everything. It’s weighed on me this entire time, but I didn’t know how to tell you. Each time I opened my mouth to confess, I just felt like the happiness you were feeling at that moment would be tarnished. The longer I held off, the longer I was worried you’d be upset with me.”
He keeps looking at me, those vibrant aqua eyes dimmed slightly, taking in everything, but also looking at me like he doesn’t recognize me at all. He’s taking in my demeanor, the way I am fiddling with my hands, much like my sister Ellie does when she’s uncomfortable, yet he doesn’t say a word.
The discomfort is growing in me. I don’t know what Grant looks like when he’s disappointed in me. I’ve never been the one to hold that type of reaction from him.
He takes another long breath in, letting it out, the tension remaining in his shoulders.
“Let me get this straight. The day you wanted to tell me ended up being the most tragic day you’ve lived through? A day you lost your friend and our child. My child. A child I didn’t know about, let alone a child I never got to mourn.”
He’s speaking, not giving me any room to interject or confirm. At this point, they’re statements, as if he’s making a mental list of all these pivotal points in my life that intersect with his. Most of all, listing all the ways I have broken his heart with my confession today.
“Add to that, you’ve been around me for years, in reality, over a decade, not even uttering a word. You simply carried this with you and didn’t think I deserved to know?” He comes to some sort of realization, and then his face is stone.
“If I hadn’t pushed you right now, would you have ever told me? If I didn’t come begging to start a relationship with you, would you have wanted me to know? Did you not think I deserved to know?”
Each question feels like a dagger to the heart.
The problem is, I can’t answer that with complete honesty. I don’t know why. I was so used to this loss being a part of my past that I never thought sharing it mattered as time kept passing.
My silence is confirmation for him. Without words, he moves around me and starts walking in the direction of Ellie’s house.
I follow, not uttering a word. Once we reach my sister’s place, he takes the steps up two at a time, waiting at the top and using his own key to get into the brownstone.
He hurries upstairs, and I can’t help but follow him. We get to my room, and he immediately starts grabbing clothes and shoving them into his bag.
“Grant, what are you doing? Why are you leaving? We need to talk about this.”
“So now you want to talk?” His words echo off the walls. Grant has never directed this tone toward me before, but I can see he’s shaking with anger.
I can’t help the tears that are falling down my face again, watching someone I love hurt and knowing that I’m the cause of that.
“Laney, I have lived each and every second that I can remember for the two of us. Without knowing, I paved my life to include you. You’ve always been my center and my light, but right now, I feel like you’re my storm. Right now, you are throwing me into a hell I didn’t know I belonged in.
“I get it; my reaction feels foreign to you. But please take a moment and realize the weight you just dropped on me. You’ve gotten ten-plus years to live with this reality. I’ve had a few minutes. I need to wrap my head around this. I need to find some space for myself to think this through. I need to process what you’ve said. I need to understand the reality you just painted me.”
My shoulders fall. I feel defeated. I did what I thought was best for me without really caring about how this might impact him. I made a decision to keep that loss my own, not including him in something he made with me.
I know what he’s saying. I’ve hurt him, and I’ve never been the one to hold that title. I have always been his biggest cheerleader, and he is mine. But today, I was the bearer of bad news. I allowed my pain to simply be that—mine.
I didn’t allow this to be our pain, and I get that now. I chose so much of that pain to be seen as only something that affected me and not both of us. In many ways, the effects of the shooting were mine to harbor, but this could have been something we shared together. I could have let him in instead of pushing him out.
I nod, unable to form words. It’s at that moment I realize my life is nothing without Grant by my side. He wanted to start something more with me less than an hour ago, and what I did may have wrecked that in a way I can never mend. He wanted tomorrow, and I never gave him yesterday.
He pauses his packing and looks up at me. It’s hard to see the utter devastation in his face.
His shoulders sag and he starts to speak, “You’re my compass, Laney. You’re the direction I’m always running toward. Don’t you get that? In your little secret, not only do I realize that I was not a priority for you to tell, but I am someone you chose to keep in the dark. You should have wanted to share this with me. I would have held your pain with mine. I would have nurtured it. Instead, you kept it all to yourself.”
He returns to shove things into his duffle bag, and something about it feels so final.
“I love you.” That’s all I can get out before I feel a sob break free.
He looks up at me, once again pausing his packing.
“I love you too. I think you need to figure out if my love is enough for you. I know yours has always been enough for me. You’ve always been enough for me, even when you, yourself, didn’t feel whole.”
He waits an extra moment, then he moves past me and walks out of my room.
He needs to grieve. Not only that, he has to find a way to see me and know that I want to walk alongside him in this lifetime. He’s my everything, but with my actions, I have shown him the opposite.
After everything I’ve been through in this life, you’d think the pain of watching your best friend leave wouldn’t hurt as much as the loss of life. But it guts me. Because I know it’s my actions that have caused this divide tonight. The pain of that day nearly crippled me eleven years ago, but I had Grant there to help build me back up. A slow, tortuous build he took on, and he had the patience to do so. But I didn’t give him that chance to know the details of why I felt so broken inside.
For so long, I took on the narrative that he had no idea what this kind of hurt felt like. But I didn’t take a moment to reflect on the fact I didn’t give him the opportunity to feel this pain.