“No,” she says gently. “She… she lost the baby. Around six months. It destroyed her.”
The breath rushes out of me. My heart pounds. My throat burns. “Oh,” I whisper. “Jesus.”
Neve nods, eyes dim. “She never really came back from it. Not fully.”
She spears her fork through a piece of pineapple, not eating, just moving it around.
“She got pregnant again a little after that,” she adds quietly. “And then again after that. But none of them stuck.”
My stomach twists.
“She had miscarriage after miscarriage,” Neve says, her voice breaking at the edge of something fragile. “Each one took awaysomething in her soul. At least… that’s what I think. I was only a kid. I just remember her coming into my room and being so happy telling me I was going to be an aunt. Then, weeks later, she’d be miserable. And it would happen again and again.”
My grip tightens around the fork. I don’t know what to say. There’s a pressure building behind my ribs, the kind that doesn’t have words, just heaviness.
Neve sets her fork down and lets out a long, uneven breath. “She was so devastated,” she says quietly. “So full of grief. She tried to take her life. A few times.”
My chest tightens.
“Damian always found her,” she adds, her voice thinning. “Always brought her back. Cleaned up the mess. Sat with her through it.”
I watch her face carefully as she swallows, like the words are too big now.
“For a while,” she says, “I hated her. For what she was doing to him. For what she was doing to my parents. But now…” Her voice breaks a little, but she pushes through it. “Now that I’m older, I understand her more.”
She presses her fingertips to her lips, eyes distant. “I was twelve when she died.”
“She… she took her own life?” I ask, my voice barely above a whisper.
Neve doesn’t answer right away. She nods slowly, then shifts in her seat like the memory physically weighs her down.
“She became obsessed with getting Damian out of Clay’s world,” she says. “Like… consumed. She swore she was being punished for everything he was doing. For the people he hurt. For the life they were living.”
My heart sinks. I grip the edge of the table, needing something to hold onto.
“They had a huge fight,” Neve continues. “I wasn’t there, but Delilah told me later. She was there. Laura was done. She packed her things. Said she couldn’t live like that anymore.” Her lips press together, eyes glassy now. “And then… there was an accident.”
Oh, no.
“She drove herself into one of those old stone overpasses doing over a hundred,” she says, her voice flat, brittle. “The car was nothing but twisted metal. They said she died on impact.”
I can’t speak. My throat feels raw. That has to be the worst way to go about ending your life. It doesn’t make sense to me.
“Damian always blamed himself for it,” she says. “Still does, I think. But she made that choice, Marlowe. As much as it hurts, it was her choice.”
I look down at the piece of watermelon speared on my fork, but I can’t bring myself to eat it. I don’t know what to say.
All I can think is—this man I’m in love with, this man who won’t talk to me, has been carrying a whole other life inside him this entire time. My thoughts start to race again, wild and tangled, chasing each other so fast I can’t catch a single one before it slips into another.
Of course this affected him. Of course he’s carrying that weight—Laura, the miscarriages, the guilt. That kind of grief doesn’t just go away. It shapes a person. Cuts into them until they don’t even bleed the same.
But what does that have to do withnow?
What does that have to do withme?
Why hide this?
Why hide everything?
