Page 80 of Happy After All

I understand that.

Finally, he speaks. “It’s been three years.”

“The summer I first started running the motel ...”

“It had been nearly four months.” I don’t know if he’ll remember any of this tomorrow. Or even in ten minutes. I want to give him something, because I intruded on his space, and he gave all this to me.

When his guard was down.

I feel bad about it now, because I didn’t imagine it was something like this. I didn’t think about him being a man lost inafter. And I should have.

I know what it’s like to have been an entirely different personbefore. How did I miss it in him?

“You know I had ... I had a relationship that imploded. I needed to get away. But it wasn’t just him. It was ...” I swallow hard and I look at my cake.

“I lost a baby,” I say. “A girl. Just three weeks before my due date. We ... had a nursery. It was really beautiful. Pink.” I touch the pink fabric on my swimsuit cover-up. “I like pink.”

He still says nothing, but I don’t find it a hard or uncomfortable silence. He isn’t silent because he isafraidof my grief. In LA I was surrounded by that kind of silence. Like people were afraid if they spoke too loud, they would break me. Like there could be anything worse than losing your child.

Christopher cheating didn’t break me. It just pushed me out the door.

Half of why was that I found other people’s discomfort with my pain unbearable.

It’s one reason no one here knows this. One reason I’ve never spoken the words out loud.

I’ve never had to.

Chris told our friends while I was in the hospital.

He called my dad to let him know there was no grandbaby after all.

I had never even told my mother I was expecting.

Maybe it had gotten back to her through my dad, but I doubt it.

This is the first timeI’veever told anyone.

“I don’t know how to get over it,” I say. “I left it behind instead.”

It’s silent in the room for a long moment. He shifts in his chair and picks up the cake. “Well. If you ever figure out how to get over it, let me know.”

That’s honest. I appreciate it.

“I’m starting to fear that getting over it is a myth,” I say.

“Yeah. That sounds about fucking right.”

“Yes, it does,” I say.

I pick up my cake too, and we sit there, painful truths pulsing between us as we eat the most delicious buttercream I’ve ever had in my life.

This is also about fucking right.

Death and cake and a beautiful man whose heart I can never have, and probably wouldn’t know what to do with anyway.

Even though it’s difficult for me to swallow every bite, I do. I’m not sure at this point if it’s my grief or his. His is a surprise. Mine is all too familiar, though I don’t often let it take such concrete shape.

I just think of before.

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