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)
“So I’m your first date since the divorce,” he says.
“Yes.” I raise my glass and smile at him before taking a sip. “What gave it away? The Wade welcome committee assembled in my foyer? My ten-year-old demanding to know your intentions?”
“I’m pretty sure those flowers are in the trash by now.”
I almost spit out my wine. “Why would you say that?”
He hesitates, narrowing his eyes and watching me closely before going on. “Do you mind if I ask what broke you and Josiah up? Everyone was shocked by it. You guys seemed so unshakable.”
“We were until we weren’t.” I laugh bitterly. “There’s no Richter scale for the size of our earthquakes, one after the other.”
“You loved him,” he says it as fact, not a question.
I swallow the sudden heat in my throat. “Very much.”
“And he loved you.”
I will love you until the day I die.
“Very much,” I agree, setting my wineglass down carefully and lowering my eyes.
“I know about all the loss you guys experienced, but a couple as strong as you were, I thought it would bring you together.”
“I hoped it would, but maybe we weren’t okay enough at the same time to comfort each other. I know I was…not much help with the state I was in.”
“Depressed?” he asks, his tone a gentle probe I can handle.
“Yeah.” I smile sadly at him. “Very and for a long time. I just couldn’t come out of it. Complicated grief. Depression. I’ve been told both. I was always able to get up and dust myself off, but after Byrd and Henry…I just couldn’t. I don’t really know why. My therapist says sometimes the people who are always keeping things together are the least prepared when they actually fall apart.”
“That would have been a lot for anyone. We all process loss differently.”
“Yeah, back then I didn’t understand that while I needed to be absolutely still, Josiah had to be in motion all the time, avoiding the pain I was stuck in.”
I remember the nights he’d drag himself up the steps and down the hall to the nursery, staring at me in the rocker, his weariness at a standoff with my grief-induced lassitude. Two shipwrecked souls unable to figure out how to save each other. Both sinking.
How did I turn my first date since the divorce into an autopsy of my marriage? Everything always seems to circle back to Josiah. Not tonight.
“Let’s talk about something much more pressing,” I say, flashing Mark my sweetest smile. “Dessert.”
Chapter Eighteen
Josiah
Shouldn’t you be getting ready for bed?” I ask, leaning against the doorjamb of Deja’s bedroom. She’s setting up her light and tripod like she’s preparing to record, but it’s a school night and it’s getting late.
“Shouldn’t you be headed home?” she counters. “Or are you waiting up for Mom?”
Smart-ass.
“I was helping your brother with homework.”
Deja quirks a skeptical brow. “You were helping our resident genius with homework he could literally do in his sleep?”
“And we were also talking about therapy.” I step deeper into her room. “He was telling me how things have been going with Dr. Cabbot and I was telling him about my sessions.”
“How’s it been?”
I weigh my words. Therapy may not be my bag, but based on the conversations I’ve had with Kassim, he’s enjoying it. Thinks it’s helping, and I have to agree. It’s hard for me to admit even to my thirteen-year-old daughter that maybe…just maybe…I’m getting something out of therapy too.
And what does that say about me?
“Dr. Musa’s cool,” I say.
She sets the phone down on her desk and studies me from beneath the lacy edge of her black hair bonnet, which is decked with orange and white ghosts in honor of Halloween next week.
“You guys talk about Henry?” she asks. “And Aunt Byrd?”
My jaws clamp around the answer, and I make a conscious effort to release the words because I’ve discussed this so little before.
“Yeah.” I clear my throat and sit on her bed, wanting to signal that I’m willing to talk more if she needs to. Even a few weeks ago, I probably would have found a way out of here, cut the conversation off at its knees. Something changed after discussing it with Dr. Musa, unpacking how losing my parents at such a young age damaged something in me that I’ve never acknowledged, much less repaired. It’s opened the door for us to go deeper and connect that trauma to how I processed losing Aunt Byrd and Henry.
Or how I didn’t process losing them at all, which seems to be the case.
Deja flips the chair at her desk around and straddles it, facing me.
“You were so strong when they died. You held everything together,” she says, her young features, so like her mother’s, hardening. “And Mom just fell apart. Blew everything up.”
“Deja, what did I tell you about saying things like that about your mom? She did her best. We all did. Grief looks different for everyone. You saw her as falling apart and me as strong, when maybe she was doing something I wasn’t able to do.”