I watched as the words settled, and her glare deepened. She still maintained her impeccable posture, sitting on the couch like she was expecting the royal court to arrive at any moment. My father paced behind her like a caged lion—or cowardly lion. He didn’t bother to say anything. He never did.
“And just how do you expect to support yourself?” she asked.
“We’ve talked it through, and we’re both still going to school. I’ll take the second half of next year off to spend with the baby, and Garrett will attend part-time to pay for our apartment.”
Her icy demeanor didn’t change in the slightest. She showed no emotions, no hysterics. “And school? How are you going to pay for school?”
My mouth gaped open, but I closed it without a single word springing forth.
“Oh, you thought we were going to pay for it? Well, that was before you decided to get yourself pregnant. If you choose this life, Amelia, you’re on your own,” she said.
“Mom, you can’t do that! What about my trust fund?” My voice was rising, and my panic was soaring as well.
“Oh, I can, and I will. I will not support this embarrassing behavior, and neither would your grandfather, if he were alive. If you want a future that we pay for, you will end this, all of it, right now.”
My eyes widened in horror as I stared into her stone-cold face, hoping she didn’t mean what I thought she meant.
“You can’t truly mean that?”
“I do. Do you really think that you and that boy can raise a child on your own? Do you really think you can afford to live and pay for college? Who do you think will have to drop out, Amelia? I might not like the boy, but he’s loyal. Do you think he’ll let you give up your dreams?”
We’d planned it all out. We hadn’t gone into this lightly. We’d looked up housing costs and made budgets and goals. Garrett had even started looking for places he could contact for work after we moved, but everything hinged on our parents’ support. We had briefly talked about staying local, attending a community college for a few years, but he didn’t want to hinder my dreams of going to my first-choice school. He wanted me to have everything.
“I can see from your face that you know he wouldn’t. Are you willing to destroy his life along with yours for this future you have planned?”
The life I’d envisioned and planned started fading…vanishing. Garrett would give up everything for our child and me, including himself. There was no happy ending for us, not anymore.
“No, Mom, I’m not.”
The scattered papers in front of me hadn’t moved in thirty minutes. I’d been frozen in my thoughts, lost in my memories and haunted by my regrets for most of the day. I didn’t think I’d done a single productive thing since I clocked in four hours earlier.
Leah breezed in from one of the labor rooms, looking far too good for someone in a pair of scrubs. She leaned over the counter with a wide grin. “Hey, heard you went on a trip. How was it?” she asked.
“Oh, it was, um…good.”
“Good? That’s all I get? I thought we were friends. Friends get more than good, Mia.”
Where did I begin? Did I say it was an amazing two days? Yes, two days, not four. That was why I was at work on a Sunday afternoon when I should still be in New York.
I’d woken up the morning after the incident and found Garrett banging on the door. He’d told me to get dressed and that we needed to head to the airport. Something had come up, and we had to catch an earlier flight home. He’d briefly apologized in the cab for cutting our trip short, but that had been the only conversation we shared the entire way home. He hadn’t needed to lie. I’d known there wasn’t anything that had suddenly come up at home that needed his attention. He hadn’t wanted to be around me anymore, and I couldn’t blame him.
“We had a great time. He took me to a toy store,” I said with a shy smile.
“A toy store? Yeah, that sounds like Goober.”
“Goober?” I asked, intrigued by the nickname.
I’d noticed Leah had nicknames for almost everyone. She called her husband Hotshot and would sometimes refer to herself as Mrs. Hotshot with a goofy grin.
“Yeah, it’s a nickname I gave him a long time ago when he was short, adorable, and annoying. Actually, most of those are still true—except for being short. He’s like a tree now.”
A flash of him bending down to kiss me in the hotel room came rushing back suddenly. There was always quite a height difference between the two of us, and I’d loved the way he would curl himself into me to steal a kiss.
I kissed you and said everything would be okay because I knew it would be.
When he’d kissed me again after so much time, I’d felt a part of my heart repairing itself. But I had been living a fantasy. There were some things that couldn’t be forgotten.
“Well,” Leah said, her eyes locking with mine, “if you need someone to talk to, Mia, I’m here. From the expression on your face right now, I know there’s more going on, so please talk to someone. It doesn’t have to be me, but I’m here, and I won’t judge. I’m going to go check on my patients one last time and then clock out.”
She turned away and disappeared down the hallway, and I was once again alone with my thoughts.
I was so tired of thinking.
After Garrett had silently dropped me off, I’d spent the rest of the weekend drowning in my own thoughts until I finally called into work to see if I could cancel my day off. I’d thought that at least I’d have something to do besides mope around the house. I hadn’t even bothered calling Liv to tell her I was home early, so she could bring Sam back.
As I’d waited for Sunday to come and work to follow, I’d just sat in my empty house and remembered. Memories could be the best and the worst part of living. The good kind could keep someone going, serving as a reminder to keep moving even when life was intent on dragging one down. The bad memories were like little reminders of everything everyone tried so hard to forget—reminders of failure, guilt, and periods of our past that were unchangeable. They clawed at every good memory, making them fade into the background until only pain was left.
Months after that fateful night with my parents, when my entire world had changed, I’d spent hours on the Internet researching grief. I’d read story after story of other women who had gone through the same thing I had. I’d learned I had a form of posttraumatic stress disorder, but I had felt too ashamed to seek treatment.