it removed the last vestige of illusion. I couldn’t pretend that I wasn’t here, much less that Edward and I hadn’t just had sex.
Frantic that the past was crowding in here too, I turned on him. “I don’t want you around. This is my home. I have a good job and good friends. I’ve invested four years of my life building something different from what was before.”
“I know—”
“Want to know why?” I asked, and suddenly my voice was shaking, suddenly my whole existence was shaking. “Because I had to. I had no other choice if I wanted to survive, because you all pushed me away. My mother disowned me, my brother distanced himself, my friends rejected me, my father died on me, and you divorced me.”
“I know—”
“Mom blamed me for my father’s death, my brother blamed me for her grief, my friends blamed me for making them look bad, car makers blamed me for being a reckless driver, you blamed me for killing your daughter.”
“It was an accident—”
“And that makes a difference?” Even barefoot, he was taller than me by a head, but I was past the point of being silenced. “She’s gone,” I shouted. “I can’t bring her back.” My voice cracked. “I nearly killed myself, Edward. Do you know that? I had pills. The doctor prescribed them after the accident to help me sleep, but I didn’t want to sleep. I couldn’t let go of the image of Lily lying upside down in that car, still strapped in her seat but crushed on the wrong side and bleeding and covered with glass, because if I let it go, I’d be letting myself off the hook. So I saved up the pills.”
“I didn’t know.”
“Of course you didn’t.” I pressed a hand to my chest, working harder to breathe but unable to stop. “We were living in the same house totally apart, and you were wrapped in your own grief, but a mother’s is worse, Edward.” I gulped for air. “I carried her, I nursed her, I fed her and read to her and let her make perfectly horrible things out of clay, every one of which was beautiful, because she’d made it with her own little hands. Then it ended.” I pressed harder on my chest, desperate to say it all. “Her bedroom went untouched, her Cheerios went uneaten, her clothes went unworn, the stuffed animals she loved went unloved, and it was all my fault. I held those pills in my hands more nights than I can count. I went so far as to pour myself a huge glass of water so that I’d have enough to wash them all down.” That quickly, I was caught back in the horror of it.
He looked shaken. “Why didn’t you?”
Coming from another man, it might have been an accusation, even a dare. But Edward had never been cruel. He simply wanted to know.
I spotted my coat on the floor, picked it up, and held it to my chest. It was my life jacket, a piece of the present that would keep me afloat. As I held it, I forced in one breath, then another. The tightness in my chest eased just enough. “I asked myself that a dozen times—ten dozen times. When you lose the most precious thing in your life, how do you go on?” Again, consciously, I inhaled. “But how do you not? I lost everything, Edward, not just my daughter but my marriage, my family, my home, my career. I was all alone and searching, searching for something good about myself, and the only thing I could come up with was courage. Killing myself would have been cowardly. It would have been taking the easy way out. I couldn’t let myself do that.” Defeated, I inched my arms into my coat. “But I couldn’t stay where we lived. I couldn’t wake up each day to the wreck of my life, so maybe I was a coward after all.”
“No.”
I raised my chin with remnants of pride. “When I first moved here, I used to cry myself to sleep, the loneliness was so devastating, and when tears didn’t work, it was rocks in my chest. But I made it through, and now I can’t go back. You can. You have a life in Massachusetts. You have colleagues and friends. You have a big, beautiful house.”
Eyes glassy, he half-shouted, “Do you seriously think I wanted to stay there, just me and all those memories?” His tone leveled. “I sold the house.