Page 94 of Survival

“You’re welcome. Now, can you explain something to me?”

“Whatever you need me to.”

“Earlier, when I asked if you ever worried about living through it, you said something about every day and almost everynight. What did you mean?”

I winced. “I’ve been having nightmares anddaymares pretty much every day since you fell.”

She grew quiet, the wheels in her head turning before she said, “I’m sorry. I never realized. I thought you were just there at night chasing away mine.”

A small smile touched my lips, and I pressed another kiss to her head. “Something I’d do a thousand times over, but no, you were chasing away mine, too. Those few nights when we’d try to sleep apart? Any time I managed to get a little sleep, I’d wake up to the same haunting images that plague me during the day.”

“Do you want to tell me about them?”

I swallowed, her fingertips drawing gentle circles into my kneecap. “It hurts just to think about them.”

“Isn’t that why we’re talking tonight? I thought we were getting all the bad out?”

I sighed, knowing she was right. “It’s a bunch of images flashing through my head. I see the look on your face when you were falling, right before your head hit that bench. I see you lying at the bottom of the stands, blood pooling all around you, all over my hands when I tried to stop it. The sight of you lying in that hospital bed, bandaged, bruised, and fragile, looking like you already knew the worst. The way you cried out when I told you we’d lost her.

“And then I keep thinking about what Zoey must have been feeling. How she was hurt and dying and we couldn’t get to her. I had to bury her, while you were too broken, it was on me. I held her tiny, broken body in my hands, knowing at least one of her parents should hold her before she was put in the ground.”

I sucked in a sharp breath, my tears falling freely now, feeling myself breaking with everything I was finally saying out loud. No one had known about the nightmares. About any of it.

“You have no idea how scared I was. I just kept praying, but praying didn’t work to save you both. We lost her. I almost lost both of you, and I couldn’t do anything to stop it.”

ISABEL

I turned quickly in Tucker’s arms as he broke down, his body beginning to shake. His tears were rough, tortured and wrenching, and they beckoned my own to start as well. The fissures of my heart were spreading, fracturing further through the wall I’d created as the pressure built. Tears couldn’t help but leak out.

Everything Tucker had just admitted, everything he’d been through, were things I’d been spared. They were burdens solely on him, and I’d never once thought to ask. To check onhimand whathe’dendured.

I knelt in front of him and wiped away his tears so I could stare fiercely in his eyes. “I amsosorry you had to go through that. That would have been horrible, seeing Zoey that way…” I swallowed, my throat tight with tears. “I can only imagine what it must have been like for you to see either of us that way because the merethoughtof that happening to you just about wrenches me in two. It wouldn’t be bearable. My life would beoverif I lost you.”

And at that moment, I knew it was time to let my baby go. That I could really do it. Because losing Zoey had been torture, but I’d survived. I simply couldn’t if I ever lost Tucker. He was the center of my universe, and my universe would without a doubt implode without him in it.

Zoey was gone. Tucker was here, and he deserved the very best version of me that I could offer.

The dam in my chest was breaking now. I could feel the flood coming, and I braced myself for it, ready to take on the pain that I now knew wouldn’t kill me as long as the man in front of me was by my side.

TUCKER

Izzy’s final words had struck home, the pain I’d been suppressing for so long shooting through me like a bolt of lightning, crashing into that wall I’d built to send it crumbling down around me. Izzy had described exactly how I felt. While losing our daughter had been absolute, soul-changing hell, my life would beoverif I losther.

And now, her tears were just as fierce as mine, and I knew that could only mean one thing. That she was finally letting everything hit her, too. The walls around us were broken, and we were here, together, to crash and then rise from the rubble.

Chapter 29

TUCKER

I ran my fingers along Izzy’s back as she turned another page in the pink baby book lying in front of us. Each time I couldn’t help but be awed at the detail she’d put into it. Every page she could have done was complete. She’d written so much for Zoey to one day read, and now, we were reading by moon and candlelight, the candles from earlier half-buried in the sand around us.

Izzy had told our daughterourstory, of our friendship and how I’d been her rock, her safe place to turn to when her dad had died. How she’d fallen for me first and how I’d been too stubborn to realize what I wanted. How it had felt when we’d finally gotten together.

She told her how we were so surprised and how nervous we felt when we learned she was on the way, and how Izzy had only fallen more in love at the first sound of her thrumming heartbeat. How I’d fallen just as in love with her when I felt her kicks, and I closed my eyes when I realized Izzy had written that part on that last day, just hours before we lost her, telling Zoey how her daddy had made picking out her name into a game.

She’d told our baby all the plans we’d made. How happy she was to be having a little girl and that she had an aunt and uncle and family just as excited to meet her.

The pages were filled with pictures, notes, and ultrasounds, and each one held something new for me to feel and to process.

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