Total pages in book: 137
Estimated words: 131486 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 657(@200wpm)___ 526(@250wpm)___ 438(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 131486 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 657(@200wpm)___ 526(@250wpm)___ 438(@300wpm)
“I knew something was wrong even before the hospital called. As soon as the plane landed, I wanted to get right back on and fly home. Something just felt off. I should have come home. It would have changed everything.”
“Do you have any idea how many times I replay you telling me not to close Grits that night? To go home early?” Tears thicken my voice. “Or how I hated myself for not getting that loose board repaired the week before, when it was on my list of things to do?”
I tripped.
Alone at Grits, rushing to set the alarm, my shoe got caught in the tiny space created by a loose floorboard, and I fell so hard right on my belly. I’d sent Milky home because he was sick and exhausted. And there, alone on the floor with a bad ankle sprain in the long minutes it took to reach my phone in another room, I lost Henry.
Placental abruption.
I knew it was a bad fall, a hard fall. I didn’t catch myself, so my stomach took the brunt of it, but I didn’t have any idea Henry wasn’t getting air. So many days I would sit in the rocking chair and stare at the words on his wall, think of him unable to breathe, and hold my breath, deny myself oxygen for as long as I could, until black spots appeared before my eyes. A tiny punishment that never changed a thing.
“He was always so active.” I force the words from my throat.
A rueful smile touches the strong line of Josiah’s mouth. “We used to say that boy kicked you like he was trying out for the Cowboys.”
“Right?” I manage a short-lived smile that comes and goes like vapor. “But after I fell, nothing. He didn’t move at all, and I knew…”
My water broke, tinged pink with blood and panic. On the frantic drive to the hospital, I knew I was losing him. Tears floated in my throat while the doctor did the ultrasound, waiting for a heartbeat. The ill-disguised horror in the nurses’ wide eyes. The doctor’s professional mask of compassion when he confirmed Henry was gone before he ever came.
“A part of me did die with him,” I tell Josiah, my voice scratching to get out. “And it took a long time to learn how to live without that piece.”
I sat in the chilly, sterile room, numb and only half hearing the doctor say a C-section would be the best option in a case like mine. My body, which for eight months had been the source of life for my baby, had become a tomb.
“Some nights,” I whisper, eyes fixed but unseeing, “I feel this phantom pain. It’s not from falling on my stomach, though. It’s my ankle. How it twisted when I went down. How long it took me to get up, and I wonder what those minutes cost him. Should I have called the ambulance instead of driving myself to the hospital? If I could have…if I had never…”
Tears streak my cheeks as I bury the unfinished thought with all the other what-ifs and unfulfilled prophecies that plague me. Josiah pulls me over to him, wraps his arms around me. I huddle into his warmth, into an embrace so familiar it makes me ache that I haven’t had it. With our past coming back to haunt us, he’s tethering me to this night, keeping me from drifting back into a black hole that some days doesn’t feel far away. His hands are big and warm on my back, stroking from shoulder to waist in long, reassuring sweeps. He smells so divinely the same, and I burrow into the crook of his neck. I grip his arms with trembling hands, feeling fiercely possessive of this moment and this man. He is mine tonight. This is a conversation so long overdue, and this is just for us and no one else. Only ours. The intimacy of sorrow for the life we made together and lost.
My tears slow and dry, but he doesn’t let go and the world would have to be on fire for me to move. He’s no longer stroking my back, but his hands stay on me. I’m afraid if I move an inch, he’ll let go, so I lie against him, holding my breath. But when he kisses the top of my head, all the air whooshes out of me. I tip my head back until I can look up at him. God, he’s beautiful like this, the lines of his face so rugged, but him, so vulnerable. His mouth, not tightly held like when he’s in control, but a relaxed sensual curve. His eyes, drowsed and heavy-lidded instead of sharp. I could stare at him in this private corner of the world until the sun comes up.