I drop to my knees next to her, cupping her face in my hands. “You did nothing wrong, Emma. Do you hear me? This was not your fault.”
My hands tremble against her cheeks as I try to meet her eyes, but she doesn’t meet mine, still staring at the screen. Her tears hang from her lashes, frozen there.Look at me, Emma.
“Maybe I—”
“Emma, no. Please. These things happen.” It feels stupid to say that. I feel stupid thinking it. But it’s the truth. Chemical pregnancies happen. And no matter how often I’ve seen it happen, no matter how many charts I’ve read, how many women I’ve comforted in exam rooms like this, I never thought it would happen to us.
Toher.My Emma.
I’m at a loss, willing her to look at me, but she never does. She’s never felt more far away than she does right now. I ache for her but also for myself and what we lost, what we thought we were getting back. I thought we were going to have another baby. And whether there was ever really a heartbeat there or not, the love was real. The hope was real. And now it’s gone.
A stabbing pain spreads through my chest, wrapping tight around my ribs and straining my breaths.
There’s a soft knock on the door, and a nurse steps inside. She’s holding a folder, the “lossfolder.” We’ve had our fair share of those in the ER. I could never bring myself to be the one to deliver them, begging my nurses to do it. I never thought I’d be on the receiving end of it.
“Mrs. Jones, would you like assistance?” she asks gently, gesturing toward Emma’s clothes folded neatly in the chair. The polite way of saying,we need the room.
Emma sits up, declining help from the nurse or me. She pulls herself together just enough to make it out of the clinic, her movements shaky but determined.
I follow her out, but she doesn’t head for the car. Instead, she takes a left and heads toward the street corner.
“Em,” I call after her, “where are you going?”
She doesn’t answer me, still walking, faster with each step. Panic lodges in my chest as I chase her down three quiet blocks, past dark shop windows, the diner, until I realize where she’s going. The small lake at the edge of town. And it’s too late to stop her.
When the rickety wooden dock comes into view, she breaks into a run. Fast. Her hair falls from its clip, her cardigan slips down her arms, her phone and purse fall to the ground. She doesn’t stop.
“Emma!” I shout, sprinting after her.
She races across the narrow bridge to the dock, the thin railing the only thing between her and the black, murky water.
“Emma!”
She slams into the railing, collapsing over it, and a scream tears out of her. It slices through the still air.
It’s a sound I’ve never heard from her before. It’s grief, excruciating and raw, and it stuns me. She’s fifty feet from me now, but I can see her shaking. By the time I reach her, she’s coming apart, gasping, trembling, falling. I catch her before she hits the boards and crush her to my chest.
She breaks right there, in my arms. Everything she’s been afraid to let show over the last few years finally comes out. The anger, sadness, the sheer fight she’s been running from. She hits my chest, the air, the space between us, her sobs shaking both of us. Anger and loss and years of swallowed pain wrap around us like smoke, thick and toxic.
“Shh, shh,” I whisper, because I don’t know what else to do. “I’m here. I’m here.”
Her tears soak through my shirt. Mine come too. I hold her until the fight drains out of her, until her body goes heavy in my arms and her cries fade into ragged breaths.
“There was never a baby,” she cries into my chest. “It was a lie.”
“It was real to us,” I say, my voicebreaking. “They were real.”
Because it was. Every bit of it. The joy, the plans, thehope…it was all real. I hold her tighter, as if that closeness could somehow absorb her pain, could make it bearable.
We sit there on the dock, long into the morning, clinging to each other. And somehow, in the middle of all that wreckage, we’re closer than we’ve been in years. It guts me to realize that it took something this cruel to pull us back together. Is that what happens when you’ve been with someone for so long? The happy moments blur, and it’s the hard ones that weld you together? Maybe love isn’t what keeps a marriage alive. Maybe it’s survival.
But can we survive this?
Chapter thirty
Emma
“Boys,weshould’vebeengone fifteen minutes ago, please hurry!” My voice ricochets off the walls as I shout this across the house, for the third time in two minutes.
