Page 24 of When to Call a Blitz

“And this is a problem?” Zara asks.

I down the rest of my wine before placing it roughly on the coffee table. “Not really. I mean, kind of. I have to be around him all the time and I feel like he doesn’t really want me there. Like he was pitying me by asking and I’m unwelcome. I don’t know.”

Learning back into the couch, Mila unfolds her legs so I’m sitting between them and begins to brush my hair through her fingers. Amara and Briar get off the couch and come sit on the floor on the other side of the coffee table.

“If he has a daughter, is the mom in the picture?” Zara asks.

I watch as Briar looks at Isla behind me on the couch, their eyes knowing, before Briar’s connect with mine.

“No,” I say simply. “She’s not in the picture.”

Silence falls as they all think. I’m not quite sure if Amara knows everything, and I know Mila knows a little from me unloading about my trip. I only told her the basics and why I felt so connected to him.

But it’s really not my story to tell, no matter how much I want my friends’ input.

Mila’s fingers start parting my hair as she braids it, and the tugging relaxes me. “It’ll all be okay. I don’t know. Just a lot happening at once. At some point it’ll get better or,” I shrug, “it won’t, and I’ll move on.”

I just wish it were simpler and that life was a little kinder.

12

EMMETT

Idon’t know why I feel so compelled to tell her, but watching the sun sink lower on the horizon, the blues starting to turn pink, the girls frolicking in the water, splashing each other and throwing sand, I feel the urge to let it all out.

“My wife died,” I tell her quietly, unable to meet her eyes. I sit, toes buried in the sand, as I watch the girls ahead. Heidi’s eyes feel like hot laser beams. “She died when Juni was young. Six months.” I bite my cheek. “We were high school sweethearts. She followed me to college and got pregnant.” I feel the anxiety within me spike, my hands growing sweaty as the sand starts sticking to them more.

I open my mouth to start again, but no words come out. Instead, I close it, licking my lips and trying to think of what I want to say.

“Take your time,” Heidi whispers, her hand touching mine.

I look over at her and find that she had shifted to her side, her head propped up by her left wrist. I follow her other hand down to where it makes contact with mine, the feeling a weird mix of comfort and shame, and I can’t really place why.

“She dropped out of college before graduation, and in that time, I had graduated and was just about to get drafted. She had Juniper, and it was the best day of my life,” I tell her truthfully.

Better than the draft. Better than anything that’s ever happened to me. Better than the day I married her mom at the courthouse while she was six-months pregnant, and that day was pretty close.

The way her blonde hair was curled, and the way her baby-bump looked in her white dress she bought from the thrift shop with a couple days’ worth of tips from the diner job she got to make some money before the baby came, just in case I didn’t make it past the Combine.

We were two broke kids trying to get by, excited at the thought of maybe making it one day.

“She died days before draft day,” I say flatly, shutting my eyes. “It was heart failure. Peripartum cardiomyopathy.” I take a deep breath, the salty air stinging my watering eyes. “We didn’t know. But we should have gone to the doctor more. We should have gotten her tested more. I don’t know.” I feel my hands ball into fists at my side, the warmth of Heidi’s hand leaving as she takes it back, and I don’t have it in me to ask her to put it back.

I don’t want to think about why I want it there.

“There were, well,are,a lot of coulda, shoulda, woulda. But I can’t travel back in time. It happened and there’s nothing I can do about it now.”

We sit in silence, and although part of me wants Heidi to say something—anything, a larger part of me is happy for the reprieve.

Heidi sniffles quietly. “She would be proud of you, you know that, right?”

My lips tighten. “I don’t know about that.”

“You didn’t give up.”

“I wanted to.”

“But you didn’t. You wanted to so bad, and you didn’t give up. So many people would have.”

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