Page 40 of If You Go
Silence settles for a beat. Then Bridget claps once. “Eat somethin’ before your thoughts chew holes in ya,” she orders, and somehow I love her more for it.
I try. I pick at a slice of toast, a piece of apple from a plate someone set down without me noticing. It tastes like nothing. I want to be helpful. I want to be steel. I want to be anything other than a woman whose hands won’t stop trembling.
Alisha edges closer and drops her voice. “Surry, love… I think it’s time.”
“For what?” I croak out. My throat knows before my brain does.
“To tell them,” she says gently, eyes flicking to Brenden, to Joshua and June, and the others who are all pretend not to stare. “Brenden, Josh and June don’t know why we’re here. It’ll help them help you.”
“I—” The room tilts. Words knot behind my teeth. Shame, old and shapeless, licks up my spine. It’s stupid. I know it’s stupid. Shame belongs to him, not me. But it lingers like smoke you can’t wash out.
Richie comes to my other side, warm palm at my elbow, that soft look he gets when he’s dead serious. “Start at the beginning,” he says. “Like you told us. We’re not going anywhere.”
Hazel nods. “No judgment. No pity. Just us.”
I look at Brenden.
He doesn’t push. He doesn’t prompt. He just tips his head the slightest bit, a yes that says I’ll stand here as long as you need me to.
I turn toward the kitchen. “Bridget?”
She’s already moving, clearing the end of the long island like she’s done this with me before—because she has. Kettle on. Mugs down. Honey. A plate of shortbread, because sugar helps even if science says otherwise. The domestic sound of it eases something sharp in my chest.
We file in. Take places. The kettle sings. The steam smells like chamomile and safety.
“Where do I even start?” I ask the rim of my mug.
“With the beach,” Alisha says, voice steady. “With how young you were.”
So I do, but I go back even further.
“It started when I was seventeen,” I say, and my voice doesn’t break, which feels like a miracle. “Gavin Kelly was kind. He was—God—he was perfect at pretending. Flowers. Notes. He said I was his future. It felt… safe. Looking back, I now know he meant future as in the mafia, not the love of his life future.”
I talk. The words feel like stones I have to carry from one side of a river to the other. I set them down, one by one. Meeting him. His family’s shadows I told myself not to see. The proposal on the sand, the ring I thought meant forever, the wedding, the early sweetness.
“How old were you when you found out about your parents?” Joshua asks carefully.
“On my wedding day,” I answer. “I thought my dad was in private security. Sam knew. Selene and I didn’t. Looking back, that was the point.” I take a breath. “We got married. At the alter, he threatened me, but I thought maybe it was the stress, orshowing he was powerful tot he rest of the congregated mafia in the chapel. But three months later, what was left of the kindness curdled entirely.”
I talk about the trying. The not conceiving. The first miscarriage. The second. The way he folded grief into a weapon and used my body to sharpen the blade. I keep my voice flat, because if I add feeling, I won’t survive the paragraph.
“When I ‘misbehaved,’ he’d slap me,” I say. “When I lost a baby, he’d make a show of it. Drag me out. Humiliate me. Sometimes worse.” The room goes very still. “Some of his men tried to stop him. He made examples of them.”
Brenden’s hand finds mine under the counter. His palm is hot. His thumb rubs that slow, grounding circle again and again like he’s telling my nervous system a story where I live.
“Eventually,” I say, and the word tastes like blood, “a doctor said I was ‘ready to try again’ after the fifth miscarriage.” Ready. Like a switch you flip. Like I’m a machine that just needed maintenance.
The next part lives in my throat like glass. I can’t swallow it down or cough it out.
I stare into my tea until the leaves blur. The room waits. Alisha’s hand is on my back, between my shoulder blades, an anchor.
“Do you want to finish, or do you want me to?” She asks quietly.
I shake my head, but it’s not a no. It’s anI don’t know.
Brenden’s voice comes from a softer place than I knew he had. “Siren.” I look up. He holds my gaze. “We can step out. Just you and me. You don’t owe anyone the worst parts unless you want to.”
The relief that floods me is humiliating and holy. I nod once. “Okay.”
