Page 53 of Letters to Lily

Oct. 31

Brad made his way into my room about 45 minutes after our phone call had been dropped thanks to my dead cell phone battery. “Hey, Sasha,” he called out to me as he came through the door. Weird, because he hadn’t called me by my actual name since I found out I was pregnant.

“You look exhausted. Maybe they can roll another bed in here and you can take a nap until the cute redheaded nurse comes into poke and prod at you!” I winked at him eliciting a small chuckle.

“Sasha, I need to tell you some things.” He started, and immediately I was on alert. I didn’t respond. Instead, I just tipped my head towards the end of my bed indicating he could have a seat. Brad sat in the spot I indicated and took one of my hands in his. “I talked to my brother, Kade, after our call got disconnected.” The smile faded from my face. “I can’t believe that all this time I never knew it was him. I never knew the girl he… well, I never knew it was you either.” He was shaking his head in disbelief now. “I wish I had known. I could have made it better for both of you so much sooner, and hell, spared myself while I was at it.” That admission coming from him really sucked. “He was here a minute ago,” I looked up toward the door of my room waiting to see him magically appear in there. I was split down the middle about whether I wanted that to happen here and now or not. “He’s not here now, but that wasn’t exactly by choice.”

Okay, that just made me a little angry, because if Brad had kept him from coming to see me, I was going to go ballistic. “Please, explain why.”

“I will get there, and I don’t think it’s what you’re thinking right now so give me just a minute to catch you up on what I learned today, okay?”

I nodded and waited for him to continue. “I had no clue, as I just said. Neither of you ever said the other’s name. Hell, all he ever said was that his ex-girlfriend had been his best friend right up until she cheated on him.” I gasped, my jaw dropping, and tears forming in my eyes, but he carried on. “He said she changed her number and moved without anything more than a message sent through his old roommate.”

“Cheated on him? What in the hell is that supposed to mean? I never!” I sat back, wondering how he could have ever believed something like that about me.

“Jason, his old roommate, showed him pictures of you. He had already deleted them by the time he was telling me about it, but from what he described, I would say it was the day you found out you were pregnant. You started to fall when we were on the apartment landing, and I tucked you into my lap and held you. Remember? Then I carried you into the apartment. Well, Jason had been lingering around the complex for some reason that day and snapped a couple pictures. They weren’t exactly high quality, but you’d been wearing a special shirt or something, so it was easy to recognize you.”

“He’d had it made for me a few months before,” I confirmed.

“Well, because of the pictures, and then your number being out of order. He believed Jason.”

Tears were streaming in hot little rivers down my cheeks at that point. “Oh God! All this time, he thought… and I thought… but he left before that though,” I finally managed to eke out.

Brad told me what he knew of how things went down with Kade going to rescue his mom from his dad swindling her, and how everything spiraled out of control from there. He told me about Jason sabotaging his phone before he left and how he had to get a new one. The number transfer for Kade’s phone didn’t go through since he was in Vegas, and he actually still had a Vegas number, because of that. Everything was starting to fall into place as Brad explained everything. Hearing all of it only made the heartbreaking situation I thought I was in that much worse, because none of it ever had to happen.

“Why was he here, but didn’t come up?” I finally asked.

A smirk appeared on Brad’s face then. “Well, Kade was about to walk into the hospital when Jason was walking out. No clue why he was here to begin with, but they had some words, and then Kade beat the shit out of him. Actually, Kade beat the shit out of him while they had words too until hospital security and the cops showed up.” That elicited another gasp from me.

“They arrested him?” Not that I needed his answer, because of course, they had. There were bound to be witnesses and security tapes to show what happened even if the police hadn’t seen anything for themselves.

“He wanted more than anything to be up here, but he’d just put most of this together, and Jason seemed to be the worst damn part of how everything went wrong.”

“I don’t understand why though.”

“Something about not wanting to lose Kade as a roommate. Of course, Kade pointed out the irony that he wasn’t his roommate anymore anyway and it had nothing to do with you being in the picture.”

“That bastard. I bet he’s the one that did that shit to my phone and e-mail too so I would have to change it all.” Brad nodded.

“It would surprise me if it wasn’t him. Actually, I already told the police that downstairs when they asked why I thought Kade attacked Jason. I told him that Jason had been stalking you, messing with your phone and e-mail, taking pictures of you. I’m not sure how that will factor into things since Kade destroyed the pictures, but hopefully just hearing it will help. I also let them know that Kade thought Jason may have been here to harass you which is what set him off.”

“I haven’t seen Jason in a few weeks, and haven’t spoken to him in months,” I admitted.

“Yeah, well, if the cops ask, you might want to help my brother out a bit and tell them you’ve seen him watching from a distance quite often.” He winked at me then. I didn’t say anything to that.

“I know this whole situation was worse on you while it was happening because of the pregnancy, but it’s been tough on him too. The way he spoke so reverently about you…” Brad’s voice trailed off and he cleared his throat to try to hide the little bit of pain that slipped through.

“How broken hearted could he have been though? He moved on… when I wouldn’t. He has a new girlfriend. I saw them together,” my own voice choked up as the memory of seeing them so happy in the diner hit me full force.

“Sasha, he didn’t have a baby reminding him daily. He had stories of you cheating and being involved with someone else. It took a lot of convincing to get him to even hang out with Jenn as friends.” I flinched at the sound of her name. “Hell, I don’t think he was even giving it his all, more like going through the motions hoping it would help him to get over you.”

Tears were once again streaming down my face. “Logically, I understand the differences in our situations. But how could he ever believe I would cheat on him?” A sob broke free then. “I keep seeing him walking into the diner with his arms around her, laughing, and looking so happy. They looked so damn happy together. I never saw him that way with any of those other girls before we got together. I know he believed what that asshole told him, that I cheated, but… seeing that… it still stabs at my heart. I was sitting there writing about him, about my broken heart, about how I wished he would come back for the baby even if he couldn’t find his way back to me…” Another sob tore loose from me. “Then there he was, obviously close enough that they were intimately involved at some point. He may have started whatever they had reluctantly, but they’re happily together now, from what I saw at the diner the other night. There is no changing that fact. I saw them, and there’s this piece inside of me, one I didn’t even realize was still left there, that shattered so completely after seeing that. It’s the only thing I’ve been able to picture when I try to go to sleep at night for the past few days.”

Kristin had come in the room and was standing by the door while I’d been talking to Brad. She moved across the room at a quick pace and threw her arms around me. I looked over her shoulder at Brad. “I need time, Brad. Please, my heart hurts, and I know Helen will have him out of jail quickly. Make him give me time to figure out how to deal with all of this. I need to figure out how to wrap my head and my heart around the fact that he’s with someone else. I’m never going to have him in my life again, but worse, I probably have to figure out how to share my baby with him too.”

I knew I had gone off on a crazy, emotional tangent, but my heart had been eviscerated. It was one thing to not know how his life had changed and still have hope that one day he’d come back, and we’d be able to be a family. It was another to know he had simply moved on and now I had to watch him be a family with our baby and another woman.

“Sasha, I’ll do what I can, but you should also know that he’s not with Jenn anymore. He realized she knew about your connection to him and never said anything to either of you.”

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