At Any Moment (Gaming The System Book 3) (32 page)

Perhaps that moment had cost us
our
survival as a couple. I swallowed, my throat suddenly feeling thick. I had no idea what I could say to her. So I let her cry until she calmed down. I slowly sank to the sand a short distance from her.

Finally, after an endless period of hearing nothing but her sobs, she quieted, rubbing her cheeks against her pant legs. Wearily she lifted her head and with a sniff and a hiccup, she spoke in a quiet voice. “I should go,” she said. “I should let you get on with your life.”

That tightness in my throat threatened to strangle me. Because I was beginning to think that maybe that was the only solution to this.

Chapter Thirty-Seven
Mia

I waited in the weighted tension between us for him to respond. And as each second stretched on, it became more likely that he’d agree with me—that I should go. That this was the only solution for us. And that scared me most of all.

I’d finally had the cry that I’d been craving since that afternoon—since Alex’s pronouncement that Adam and I would only have one child and one child only. Because I knew—and he knew—that we’d already endured that secret, shameful loss. All I could feel was this void, like my chest had been ripped open, my eyes sore and my head aching. I breathed again, those painful, shallow breaths.
I should let you get on with your life…

He took in a shaky breath. “What makes you think I have a chance in hell of doing that without you?”

I gulped in air around a hiccup. “I’m starting to think we might be broken beyond repair.”

He shifted beside me. “Sometimes I feel like there hasn’t been better communication between us than there is now. We talk about everything. We don’t keep secrets. Except the one.”

“I’m not keeping a secret from you,” I said.

“You are. Maybe you’re also keeping it from yourself.”

I turned and looked at him. He was looking out over the water, his hand sifting absently through the sand. “I have nothing to hide.”

He tensed, jerked his head toward me. “Really? No self-loathing? All the blame you’ve taken on yourself. The guilt you’ve buried so deep it almost threatened your life—”

I stood up in a huff and looked down at him. “You’re projecting, Adam.
I’m fine.”

He didn’t move, kept his gaze out over the water while I stood looking down at him in the dim light. I crossed my arms over my chest. The cool sea breeze ruffled over my bald scalp, making me regret not having pulled on a sweatshirt. I clasped my upper arms tightly, growing impatient.

“You were practically catatonic—for
days
. No talking…you turned your face to the wall, hardly ate a thing…”

“How can you blame me for that? It was a shitty time—”

“I agree. But you wouldn’t let anyone in to help you. You deliberately increased your own suffering. You refused the pain medications…why did you do that?”

My breath squeezed out of me like I’d just been punched in the gut. Suddenly I was shaking…slowly I sank into the sand beside him again. I didn’t have an answer for him that he didn’t already know. I’d insisted on feeling every cramp, every ache, every bit of the pain. It had been my way of acknowledging the potential life that I was ending.

But Adam wasn’t about to let me off the hook. After minutes of silence he turned and pinned me down with his black eyes. “
Why
, Emilia? Tell me.”

“You already know why, apparently.”

“Do
you
?”

I leaned away from him. “That was months ago and I was going through hell…”

He looked away. “We both were, but that gets lost in the shuffle.”

I reached out and touched his solid arm on which he was leaning. My hand closed over it. “I never want you to think I don’t acknowledge that this was your loss, too.”

“What about the blame?”

My jaw dropped and my mouth worked. His eyes were hard, accusing. “I—I’m sorry I got pregnant. It was my fault—”

“Wrong.”

I breathed in, a vice tightening around my chest. That pain was back and increasing. “I don’t blame you—you didn’t know I’d gone off birth control. I didn’t tell you. It
is
my fault. Everything is my fault.”

“Why not blame yourself for getting cancer, too, while you’re at it? You’re going to punish yourself. Like refusing the meds, you’re going to keep this poison and darkness inside and never let anyone help you—because you
never
let anyone help you. You’re going to hide yourself from everyone—from me. Like the scars on your chest.”

Tears sprang from my eyes and I shook my head. “You’re not being fair.”

“Neither are you. It takes two people to conceive a child, Emilia.
I
was there too.
I
put you in that situation. And I know about the guilt and self-loathing you feel because I feel it, too.”

I put my head in my hands, resting my elbows on my knees. Adam made no move to comfort me and I couldn’t tell if he was angry, frustrated or just scared.

“I’m sorry…”

“No. Stop it. I don’t want to hear that from you. Life happened. Shit happened. You made the decision that saved your life and now you torment yourself for it. You’ve built a prison for yourself and I’m afraid that you’ll never let anyone in to break you free.”

I shook my head, denying his words.

“You
have
. You told me as much, that night you went to the hospital—” He cut himself off, as if he’d said something he instantly regretted. He jerked his head back and turned to look out over the water again.

“What did I say?”

He closed his eyes, squeezed them tight and then took in a shivery breath. He looked as if he was moments away from breaking down himself.

“Please…tell me.”

His jaw tensed and he didn’t look at me. “You said that…that you didn’t want to die but you were probably going to…that—” He straightened, tensing, as if he was fighting his own grief with everything that was in him. “That you deserved to die because of what you did…” His voice trailed off, swallowed in emotion. He reached up and angrily swiped the back of his hand across his eyes and I sat back, flabbergasted.

I’d said that? I stared at him, utterly overwhelmed, what he must have gone through, then. The feelings he must have felt—the thoughts that must have run through his mind when I’d said it. He’d been in fear for my life, carrying me, barely conscious, to the ambulance, staying up with me all night in the hospital with my words running through his mind on repeat.

“Adam, I shouldn’t have said that. I’m so sor—”

“Stop it!” he practically shouted in my face and I jumped, pulling back. His fist slammed down in the sand. “Goddamn it, Emilia, if you say you are sorry one more time…”

I held my hand up. “I’m afraid…how about that? I’m afraid about what this has done to us. I’m afraid we don’t know how to fix this…”

“I’m afraid to touch you.”

That hung in the air, thickening it with tension. My mouth opened to reply but nothing came out.

He shook his head and eventually continued. “I can’t go through that again. I can’t watch
you
go through that again. Every time I touch you—every time I want you, I’m scared shitless that I’m going to put another baby in you and it’s all going to happen again.”

“It doesn’t have to happen again. We’ll be careful…”

“We need help.
You
need help. Professional help.”

I sat back on my haunches and looked at him. “I’m not—”

“You said you didn’t deserve to live. You need help that I can’t give you.”

“Will that make a difference?” I asked in a tiny voice. “Will it even begin to eliminate the baggage we are carrying?”

He looked away and shrugged. And that shrug did more to me than any of his words previously had done. My gut sank. I felt like I was suffocating. Adam had lost hope. He no longer believed that we could be fixed.

This realization shook me harder than anything because, since the beginning, he had always believed in us. Long before I had ever thought it possible, he’d believed. He’d pursued this relationship because he’d known we were right for each other. He’d known what he wanted. He’d always been so sure of us.

But, apparently, not anymore.

“You’ve lost hope…” I said quietly.

“I don’t know. Maybe. I just feel empty right now. We’re human. We can only take so much. And we’ve had more than our fair share.”

“You said that life isn’t fair. That we don’t get to have everything. But does that mean we don’t get to have
anything
—that we’ve gone through all that together not to deserve to be happy together?”

He shrugged, shaking his head.

I wanted to cry again. I felt lost, cut adrift. My hand wandered to the compass around my neck, my fist closing around it. We’d lost our way. We were drifting aimlessly.

I watched him and he didn’t move, his hands fisted in the sand, leaning back on stiff arms, staring out over the black water. The water lapped against the shore. I could hear the song of frogs coming down from the wetlands. People were talking out on their patios on the other side of the Back Bay. But between us? Dead silence.

Void. Emptiness.

“Adam. I still believe in us,” I whispered. It hurt to put that out there with no idea of how he’d react but the silence between us had hurt worse.

After a long silence he said, “I wish I could say the same. More than anything I wish it.”

Grief seized me then but I didn’t cry. I’d traveled past that stage into a desolate wasteland that was beyond tears. It was dry, empty and lonely, this wasteland. It was a place of my own making and I had no idea how to find my way out. I fingered the compass.

“More than anything, I wish that I had the words to tell you how I feel… about you, about this,” I said.

“But you don’t. And that’s the problem. Because I don’t have those words either.”

Space and time seemed torn and shredded between us. Ripped. An impassible barrier. My throat constricted. “What should we do?”

He turned to me, watched me. “I don’t know. I have to think. You have to think. I’m tired and it’s late and we should sleep.”

I knew damn well I wasn’t going to sleep. I’d be up all night worrying about it, running the past few hours through my mind over and over again—running the past months through my mind whether I wanted to or not.

Why did love hurt so much?

Without another word I stood up and watched him get up and brush sand off his pants. Slowly, together but apart, we walked back to the house. He paused to let me enter first and I glanced up into his eyes. Not mirrors. Not shutters. They were pools of black emptiness, suffering, hurt.

I’d done that to him. I fought for another breath, moved through the door up the stairs and into my room without stopping. We never spoke another word to each other. Not even good night.

When I closed my door and flipped off the lights, in the blackness, my back up against the wall, I slid down to sit on the ground and for hours, long after I had any feeling left in my legs and butt, I sat and stared. And thought.

And felt. And ached.

And then went numb.

Chapter Thirty-Eight
Adam

I was up all night. I didn’t even try to sleep. Part of it was spent pacing in my office, another part on my laptop in bed—despite Emilia’s efforts to break me of that habit. At one point I found myself typing out exactly what I wanted to say to her. Despite the emotionally painful confrontation on the beach the night before, there were plenty of logical facts and reasons for deciding on how to proceed. I agonized over them. We were both burying ourselves under mounds of grief and guilt and pretending we could make it go away without having to deal with it.

We were both good at doing that.

I didn’t want my words to be delivered from some impersonal email so I instead memorized the main points of what I wanted to get across and called it even. At six a.m. I changed into my shorts and running shoes and went down to work out in the exercise room.

I’d already run ten kilometers on the treadmill and was getting a drink before going back to do some weights when Emilia came down for breakfast. She was fully dressed in jeans and T-shirt, a bandana tied around her head. And she was pale, drawn, with dark circles under her eyes.

She’d slept about as well as I had, apparently.

I was refilling my water bottle when she came to stand beside me at the fridge. I took a deep breath and said, “Good morning.”

A faint smile ghosted her lips before vanishing. “Hey.”

“I’d ask how you’re feeling but… well, I think I already know.”

She looked into my eyes then. “Yeah. Best not to ask that.”

I screwed the top back on my water bottle and turned from her when her hand darted out to stop me. “Can we talk now? Please?”

I froze and turned back to her, my insides constricting. I hadn’t wanted to do this now. I’d wanted to wait a little while, until lunch maybe, or the afternoon. Because I knew exactly what I wanted to say to her but I wasn’t ready for how she was going to take it. I’d need a few more hours to get the courage up for breaking her heart.

Despite that thought, I said, “Sure.”

I moved to the kitchen table and sat down and she sank into a chair across from me. I set my water bottle aside.

“That was a pretty gigantic can of worms we opened last night,” she began.

I fell back against my seat, watching her carefully. “Yes.”

She stared at her laced her hands on the table in front of her. “And I’ve been up all night trying to think my way through it. I think between the two of us, there’s a lot of brainpower here, and I know there has to be a way through this for us.”

I envied her that hope. Because I just didn’t feel it. I studied her delicate, feminine features, the way she fidgeted with the woodwork on the table, tracing the pattern with her finger, the way she bounced one knee up and down.

The love. That pure, strong, unquestionable emotion. It was there, like always, but dampened, muted. Drowned out by a howling ocean of pain.

Before I let her travel any further down that road of hope, I knew I had to get this out quickly, like the proverbial ripping off a bandage. I swallowed. “Emilia…”