Written in the Scars(57)

“There’s nothing I can say right now that will tell you how sorry I am,” I choke out. “I should’ve been there for you.” I look at her stomach.

Would it have been different had I stayed? Did I cause this? If so . . .

“I needed you so much, prayed so hard you’d come home and help me,” she whimpers. “I was so scared, and I just felt like I’d failed. First I couldn’t get pregnant, and then I couldn’t keep it. I was so scared.” Her words are cut with an agony I’ve never heard before, a sound I’d give anything to make go away.

“No,” I insist, shaking my head. “Don’t go there. Don’t even go there, Elin.”

Tugging at my hair, feeling the pull of my roots stinging as they rip away from my scalp, devastation hits me full-force.

“If I’d known, I would’ve been here. I swear to God I would’ve.” I bite back a surge of emotions I can’t explain. “Were you alone?”

“I had Lindsay,” she whispers. “I was just dealing with this, sitting on the bed with Lindsay and feeling . . . ripped apart, I guess. Destroyed. As time went on, I got madder at you for not being there. All the sadness just consumed me, Ty. I was so—I am so—angry. Bitter, even.”

My hand finds her shoulder and I pull her into me before she can fight it. “I can’t handle the idea that you experienced that without me.”

“Me either,” she breathes. “I don’t know if I ever will. It’s like this entire process is now stained, every piece of it just another terrible memory.”

“I get that,” I say softly, “I do. But it’s not a good enough reason to end us.”

She nuzzles into my chest, her arms clasping around my waist. “You had a right to know, and I was wrong for not telling you.”

“You should’ve given me a chance to come home. To help you. To . . . go through this with you.”

“I didn’t want you to come home because of a tragedy. I never want to be that girl, the one the guy stays with out of pity. If you didn’t want me . . .”

I grab her shoulders and look her squarely in the eye. “I have wanted you since the moment I saw you at your locker in eighth grade. From the moment I asked if you had any gum because I wanted to hear the voice of the girl that took my breath away. I’ve wanted you since that exact second, and I’ve never stopped.”

An image of what that must’ve looked like, what she must’ve felt like, what she must’ve gone through, rumbles through my mind. Abandoned by me, losing a child she didn’t even know she had.

If only I’d stayed.

A humiliation as deep as I’ve ever known swamps me. “I’m sorry,” I say as the unfamiliar feeling of tears dropping past my lashes begins. It’s like a dam—once it’s breached, it’s uncontrollable.

My body shakes against her as I cry for being a failure. I cry for the loss of a child I didn’t know existed, for not being there for my best friend at the one time of her life she needed me more than ever.

I cry for not paying attention at work, letting myself get lazy and not watching the beam that fell on me and smashing my leg. I cry for my weakness of needing the pills to feel better and not rehabbing it, working harder at it, and needing an easy way out.

I cry for all those things for a long time. Elin holds me, our roles reversed, as she, the victim, becomes the strong one. And that makes me feel even fucking worse.

When I look at her again, she smiles in a way that shows what she would’ve looked like as a mother. It’s the way she looks when she talks about her students, about Dustin when he got into trouble, the way she looked when she called 911 when she found a baby deer struck by a car on the side of the road as a teenager.

“Now you know,” she whispers, rubbing her thumb against my lips.

“This is why you’ve been pushing me away?”

She nods as we reach for each other, the only other person that feels the pain we do, the only other person that can heal us from that very hurt.

The chill in the air dances across my bare skin and I shiver as my body comes down from the adrenaline.

“You ready to go?” she asks.

“Yeah.”

“Ty?”

“Yeah?”

She reaches for me with a shaky hand. “Will you kiss me?”

In the midst of the fireflies, under the bright fall moon, I kiss my wife with everything I have.





TY

I take my eyes off the road just long enough to glance at her sleeping beside me, her head resting on my shoulder. I just look at her face and think back to what this little pit bull, as Cord calls her, has been through. Alone. It’s enough to break the strongest man.