“Yes,” he said, resigned.
“Oh my God,” I laughed, but not in the usual way. In an anxious, psychotic breakdownI’m fucking losing itway. “This has to be a joke.” I tried to hold my scrambled mind together by pressing my temples. “You’re literally joking, right? Tell me you’re joking, E.”
“I was going to tell you—”
“Tell mewhen?” I shouted, my arms flung wide. “When you were already married? Maybe—maybe your ten-year anniversary would’ve been a great time, huh?!”
He tilted his head and watched as my tangled mind unspooled there on the sidewalk.
“This is… You’re a fucking asshole.” I went to walk away, but turned around again. “I cannot believe you’re getting married and you didn’t even tell me. Some damn friendship—”
“She’s pregnant, Syd.”
I stopped cold. My eyes went wide, and my mouth fell open. The way my earth, my whole fucking universe, shattered in this moment—it was God striking the earth with His fist.
“We hooked up a couple of months ago. Just a random thing… She called me a month later and… That was three months ago.”
I wanted to cry. I wanted to scream. I wanted to completely disappear and cease to exist.
“Say something,” he breathed, but I couldn’t. I didn’t have a single word to say. Shock had pinned me in place and left me silent.
When I came to, I looked him dead in the eyes with all the anger, all the hurt and pain I had pouring out of me… and then, I turned, and I walked away.
And he didn’t follow me.
I grabbed my bag from my hotel room, got in my car, and was back on the road to Austin twenty-seven minutes later. Back on the road to recovery from a heartbreak I never should have felt in the first place.
Disc 3
The Roads We Get Lost On
Track 15
“When Love Goes Wrong”
-Earth, Wind & Fire, 1997
SIX WEEKS HAD passed since my world had crashed and burned before me. Six weeks. And I hated each of them. I hated the passage of time and everything that came with it.
Six more weeks meant Emma was well into her second trimester. If my math was correct, she was likely at the halfway point. Apparently, a baby is the size of a sweet potato at twenty weeks. The fingernails start to form. Eyebrows. It’s really becoming a person in there. It’s a beautiful thing, what the female body can do, truly. But I didn’t think so then. Back then, the very sight of a pregnant woman made me sick to my stomach. Because in my mind, all of them were E’s… and none of them were mine.
I forced myself to eat. Forced myself to shower. Forced myself to breathe. I got better at pretending to be well in front of Jake. Or maybe he had just grown so used to me being misshapen that he was no longer fazed by it.
At that point, I hadn’t been home in a long time and had no intention of going back at all, but when Ren called andbegged me to come home “just for a weekend,” I couldn’t say no to her, even as depressed as I was.
Memorial Day was coming up. Jake and I had four days off, so we booked a trip home—our first together since we moved away. I was stressed on the flight. Jake kept telling me it was just because I wasn’t used to it, but I knew in my heart what was truly stirring the pit in my stomach.
Jake held my hand for the entire three hours and forty minutes we were in the air, flying from Austin to Newark. He laced his fingers through mine like he was my personal anchor. Like he knew he was the only thing that could keep me steady. He made jokes the entire time—some silly, some clever. All of them were designed to pull me out of my spiraling panic. He ordered us drinks and got me buzzed to distract my anxious mind, and it worked.
It always worked with Jake.
He was just…perfect. A quiet, steady, perfect. The kind that showed up and stayed close, and never asked for more than I could give. He made it easy to forget the storm that brewed inside me, and he didn’t even have to try. He calmed me effortlessly.
My heart had grown cold and cautious after everything it’d been through, but it always softened with Jake. He melted my edges with no effort at all, yet somehow, I was still locked in a version of myself that couldn’t meet him all the way. That aching awareness made me sad that I couldn’t be more for him.
We landed and returned to our separate worlds, but something felt heavier than usual as we stepped off the plane. We were both staying at our respective parents’ homes, so we shared a cab that would drop me off first, thentake him to his mother’s. I was doing my best to feel at ease with the separation we were about to experience, convincing myself it was only for the night, and I’d see him again tomorrow.
And then he dropped a bomb on me.
