“It was too late!” Another thud on the hardwood rattled against her forehead. “I worked through the night to get mysister cleared of the false charges and make sure those motherfuckers never hurt another woman again, and I still got home too late.”
She pressed her hand to the door, hoping his was meeting hers on the other side. That he could feel her the way she felt him. “Joel, even if you’d been there—there was nothing—” She choked on the lump in her throat. “There was nothing anyone could do to stop it.”
“Lucy,” his voice was nothing but a rasp against air. “You had to drive yourself to the fucking hospital. You told me you had to sit in a fucking garbage bag while you did it. You had no one to call. And I wasn’t there.” Thump. Thump. “I wasn’t there.”
No amount of muscle mass could have kept her upright in that moment. She slid down the wall beside the door and hugged her knees to her chest. Thick tears streamed down her cheeks as she remembered that night. How terrified and alone she’d been.
“They’d kept you overnight because you’d lost so much blood, and you were sleeping when I arrived. You woke up when I touched your hand, but you wouldn’t look at me. Then, when it was time to leave, you told me to take you to your apartment. Yours not ours. And I knew. I knew it was over. That I’d lost you.” His voice was farther down the door, and she was sure he’d slid down as well. “I thought of all the ways I wanted to fight for you. But the harder I tried, the more distant you got. And eventually I knew the only way for you to be okay was for me to leave.”
“So you did,” she whispered against her knees.
“So I did.” And that had been the end.
She tried her best to get on with life, to work, to be normal, like nothing happened, because no one had known it had.
She’d taken some sick days, but evading her mother while she was “sick” had proven harder than hiding her entire marriage. Lucy had embraced thefake it till you make itmentality with a whole new state of mind: survival.
The only thing that threatened her emotional fragility had been Joel. She’d moved back to her apartment, but he’d continued checking in, making sure she ate, wanting to talk, sitting with her in silence, asking if she would rather talk to someone else. She didn’t.
All she wanted was to pretend none of it had happened.
“I kept waiting for divorce papers to arrive,” he said. “Thought about sending them to you myself, if only to end the misery I seemed to cause you. Four years of that limbo, you were the only unfinished business I’ve ever had. But then I saw you at that wedding, and even though I know our engagement is fake, and it’s supposed to be your chance to finally achieve your dreams for your father’s company—nothing feels fake to me anymore.”
The great, self-assured Joel Morgan had never sounded more unsure. His voice was a mixture of hesitant apprehension and desperation, so unlike she’d ever heard him. He was The Fixer, the dragon slayer, the one everyone depended on, but now he sounded so helpless, and Lucy knew the ball had landed in her court.
God, this man. Only he had the power to undo her so completely that she was ready to claw out her heart and slide it under the door to give it to him.
No way could she have this conversation and not touch him, not look at him. “Joel, let me open the door.”
Before she could scramble to her feet, the door clicked open. Joel’s hand appeared around the doorframe, and Lucy realized they had been sitting back-to-back, the wall between them, this whole time.
She stared at his hand, palm down on the floor, sliding back toward her. Instinctively, she placed her hand over his. The warmth of his skin traveling up her arm went straight to her chest.
The wordsI love youtumbled around inside her, chomping at the bit to break free. But she held them back. Hadn’t he been explaining where they had gone wrong? They needed more than emotionally charged declarations of love and wild sex. They needed to rebuild from the ground up.
“I’m sorry I left,” he said, his voice a gravelly rumble that cut her heart in two.
The knot in her throat was painful, almost choking the words she needed to get out. “I was angry at you for years.” Anger was a strong word, but that’s what she’d been full of. She’d been nothing but a vessel of loathing and blame with nowhere to place it but at Joel. “You weren’t there, and I hated you for it. And I know—” She stared at their entwined hands and turned hers over in his, locking her fingers around his, holding on. “Now I know,” she corrected, “why. I wish I’d known sooner, but I understand why you couldn’t say anything.”
She hadn’t truly realized how much resentment she still carried with her until she’d seen him at the wedding. Turned out avoidance and separation hadn’t corrected anything, it had only masked it. Time had been nothing but a Band-Aid.
“I don’t hate you, Joel.” She needed to say it out loud, to put it out in the universe as a starting point. “I never did. I hated losing him. I hated how empty I felt afterward, how raw. Like something had been torn from my body against my will. Not something. My son. Our son. And Ihatedit.” A sob ripped out of her as her mind raced back in time. Afamiliar agony filled her heart, her eyes. For a few moments, all she could do was cry.
On the other side of the wall, Joel stayed silent, but his palm was warm in hers. Here. With her.
“And the first thing I saw when I woke up was you.” She remembered the touch of his hand, opening bleary eyes, facing reality. “I couldn’t imagine going back to how we were, playing house, being happy. Would we try to make another baby? Could we? Did I want to? What if I miscarried again? I didn’t want to replace him. I wantedhim.” She scrubbed her cheeks with her free hand. “Every thought I had about the future, even the next hour, was terrifying. So I turned it on you, because it was easier to be angry with you than to think about anything else.”
“You had every right to be angry,” he countered, his voice gritty. “You needed me, my son needed me, and I wasn’t there.”
Lucy squeezed his hand. They still couldn’t see each other, but somehow this connection was so much stronger, like how sensations were heightened when you put on a blindfold. There was a safety net in the blindness to express themselves freely. If she looked at him right now, if she saw the pain she heard in his voice, it would break her wide open. “You needed me as well, but I wasn’t there for you. I’m sorry I didn’t see it in time.”
Silence stretched between them. Would they spend the rest of the night sitting there like this? With the wall and the ghost of their son between them.
“I miss him,” Joel said, the last word lost in a crack of emotion.
“I know.” Her words were choked.
He squeezed her hand.
