Page 147 of Return To You

And that’s Ethan. My Ethan. No need to tell him more, he understands. Understands why I got married in a rush to someone who wasn’t meant for me. Also understands why I’m no longer married to him. And maybe even understands why I’m still talking to him, although that may be a different conversation. Hopefully, a later conversation.

“I lost the baby,” I say, my voice muffled against his chest.

His heartbeat increases under my cheek and his hand strokes my back. “Got that part, babe. What happened?”

“These things happen. There was no particular reason. It… it just didn’t…” Make it? Take? Want to be my baby? To this day I still can’t put words on it. On what happened. I used to constantly oscillate between fate and guilt. I knew the statistics and these helped. But sometimes, on my darker days, I couldn’t help but think that maybe my baby didn’t want me. And that was the hardest. I knew it not to be true, and I knew it didn’t make sense, but how could I help how I felt? How my twisted mind needed to make it my fault? To make everything bad that happened to me my fault?

Sometimes I feel these thoughts creeping back, and I fight hard to keep them at bay.

“It just didn’t happen,” I end up telling Ethan.

He closes his arms tighter around me and says nothing for a while, and then he whispers softly, “That explains Skye’s bedroom.”

I pull my face off his chest to look at him. “What?”

He gently brings me back against his quickened heartbeat. “Skye. She would have been your baby’s age?”

Bile rises in my throat. “It’s not like that.” Chris and I always talked openly about Skye needing a female presence in her life, but also not blurring the lines for her. Despite our physical resemblance, I always set people straight when they mistook Skye for my daughter. For her sake and mine. Now, did I go a little overboard by decorating her bedroom here? The jury might be out on that. Me, I don’t think so.

“Course not.” He strokes my back. “I just think… It’s almost like…”

“Just say what you need to say.”

“With Alex now… you know.” What he’s saying is, Alex is taking my place and more in Skye’s life, leaving me empty again. And there’s some truth to that.

I’m immensely grateful to the universe for sending Alex to Chris and Skye. To us. To me. She’s become a close friend. She brought balance to my cousin, and she’ll be a wonderful mother to Skye. But Ethan is right. She’ll be the one taking her to school now, and going to parent meetings, and looking after her when she has a fever. Reading her stories and helping her become a woman. I’ll still be in her life, but it won’t be the same. “I’ll be fine.”

“You deserve this, Grace. I know you want it, and you deserve it.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You’ll be a wonderful mother someday.”

I nod frantically, though I’m not sure I do see that in my future. Not with the way life keeps throwing me curve balls.

We stay quiet for a while. I don’t know what’s going through his mind. I’m trying to find the right words. “I… I felt dead inside. Not just literally. It was hard, and coming back here saved me. Literally. I felt alive again.”

I close my mind and go back to these days. Everything I’d built my new life on—a surprise baby, a new husband I was trying to learn to love as a spouse, a new state, a new environment, a new family. For a few short months, these had been my new reality. I’d worked hard on making them good for me, all for the little bundle of life taking form in my womb.

And then he or she was gone.

Everything was gone.

I couldn’t get out of bed. I didn’t want anything from life. Kyle got worried, and sent me to Emerald Creek to be with Mom, seeing as she couldn’t take time away from work to visit me in Texas.

“I came back to Emerald Creek a couple of weeks later. Just to get better, in my head. And then I never left. There was no reason.”

“How did Kyle feel about that?” Ethan asks softly, trying not to push me, but I feel the insecurity in his voice, and I owe him that. I owe him the truth. “He was fine with me staying in Emerald Creek. Probably relieved.”

Ethan grunts. “But he keeps calling you.”

I look up at Ethan. “We didn’t love each other the way a husband and wife should.” Then I add, “I call him, too, occasionally.”

His jaw tightens but he says nothing. What is he thinking?

“Although he said we should stop talking. Since you came back into my life.”

Ethan looks surprised. “He did?”

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