“You were two months along?” Jake breathed.
Tessa nodded.
He cleared his throat. “And you didn’t know?”
“No. Not until I woke up and they told me what had happened.” Tessa remembered how terrified she’d been when they rolled her away. When she closed her eyes, she could still see Jake standing in the hall of the hospital, arguing with the nurses that he needed to be with her.
Then everything had happened so fast. Several different nurses and doctors had asked her questions. She had tried to answer them all, but she’d been in so much pain. The last thing she remembered was them calling her name before everything had gone black.
“Did they say why it happened?” he asked.
Tessa had known that this question might possibly come up and had already decided just how much to share with him. It had been his baby too, so she felt it was only right to tell him about that portion of her diagnosis.
Okay, okay, okay. It was just information. She just needed to open her mouth and give him the information. “It was an ectopic pregnancy.”
“A what?” Jake asked, his brow furrowed above his nose.
“It means that the embryo attached to my fallopian tubes. It never made it to my uterus,” Tessa tried to explain without letting herself get emotional.
“Why did that happen?”
Damn. This was the part that was going to get tricky. The doctors had told her that she’d been born with a congenital abnormality in her fallopian tubes. Which would have been bad enough to hear, but then they also said that the she’d had a ruptured ectopic pregnancy. Her fallopian tube had burst. They’d rushed her to surgery then to stop the bleeding. The surgery had been successful as far as they had stopped the hemorrhage, but the outcome had ultimately sealed both Jake’s and Tessa’s fates. She would never be able to have children.
When she didn’t answer, Jake asked, “Was it something I did?”
Tessa stared at him, not having any idea what he could possibly mean. “What?”
His eyes searched hers as if looking for the truth. Then as if a verbal dam broke, words started spilling out of him. “I’ve played it back over and over again. I took you horseback riding after graduation and then we went white water rafting the weekend before. Plus, we were having a lot of sex. You should have been resting—”
“Jake, no.” Tessa reached out and placed her hand over his. “It wasn’t any of that. Nothing we did or didn’t do caused it. There was nothing we could have done. It was just one of those things.”
She would never forgive herself if Jake felt any guilt over what had happened. It wasn’t his fault. None of it was his fault. Thinking about him carrying that around for all these years broke her already broken heart.
Jake sat in front of her, silent except for his audible breathing. She would do absolutely anything to take away that tortured look in his eye.
“Do you ever think about what things would have been like? If you hadn’t…” Jake’s voice trailed off.
“Lost the baby,” Tessa finished.
Jake looked at her, nodding once.
As she let out a forced laugh, the tears that had been threatening to rise up and fall began spilling down her cheeks. She sucked in a choppy breath as she said, “Yeah. I think about it. Every. Day.”
Jake’s jaw tensed. He stared at her and it felt like he saw down to her soul. His nostrils flared as he breathed heavily in and out of his nose. Before she knew what was happening, he wrapped his strong arms around her and pulled her against him.
Tessa melted into his solid form. Her head rested on his shoulder as tears poured from her eyes. Her fingers dug into the safety and solidness of the arms that were embracing her.
“It’s okay. I’m here,” Jake soothed her as she sobbed against him. He ran his fingers through her hair, and with his other hand, he rubbed up and down her back. She let go of everything she’d been holding on to for thirteen years.
Pain. Sadness. Fear. Loss. Heartbreak.
She’d pushed it down. Buried it deep inside of her. Now that it had made its way to the surface, she was scared she wouldn’t be able to find her way out of it. That it would take her under like quicksand.
Tessa clung to Jake like he was her lifeline. Because he was. He always had been.
Even in the years they’d spent apart, when life got hard, which sadly was more often than not, Tessa would close her eyes and imagine Jake holding her. Just like this. Whispering that he would always be there for her. That everything would be okay.
After what seemed like forever, just as her sobs were beginning to subside, Jake’s phone went off.
“Shit,” he said under his breath.