“I just wish you’d have let me be with you during that difficult time. The baby lost, your grief...”
“It wasn’t lost the way you think,” she blurted. “I didn’t go through with it, the abortion. I couldn’t. But I lost him anyway. It felt like I was being punished...”
The look on his face could have stopped a speeding train. Shock and dread etched lines in his face. “What?”
“I didn’t have an abortion.”
“But we planned...”
“I just couldn’t. I went home. And my father had an accident so I stayed on to help take care of him. I didn’t go back to school.”
He shook his head as if to deny what she was saying. “I knew you dropped out. Of course I knew that. But I thought... I guess I thought you’d come back or finish somewhere else. I thought about looking for you but then I told myself I’d already done enough damage.” He looked around as if to see who might’ve overheard them. “Addie, we must talk. For just a little while. Come with me to Mac’s,” he said, speaking of a small, dark little off-campus pub. They’d logged many a romantic hour there, whispering and holding hands in a corner booth.
“No, I really can’t...”
“Please. I want to know everything that happened to you, and I want to tell you what happened with me. Please.”
She hesitated, but ultimately she said, “Fine. I’ll meet you over there.”
She hadn’t seen the inside of that old bar in years, but the only thing that seemed different was that it had somehow become shabbier. She remembered it as quaint and charming, but now it seemed shopworn. There were just a dozen or so people in the place, but it was midafternoon.
She saw him sitting in the back corner booth and a wave of nostalgia washed over her. She went to him and slid into the booth. He ordered them each a glass of wine.
“Tell me everything, Addie.”
So she did. She told him how deeply hurt she’d been by the picture of love and tenderness displayed by him and his wife, their angelic little girl between them. She had confronted him that day, accused him of lying to her, told him to go to hell and never bother her again. And she remembered she was crying the whole time.
And even then, in her rage, she protected him by going to his campus office where no one would witness the confrontation.
She told him about having the baby, a stillborn boy.
“A son,” he said wistfully.
Then she told him about the years that followed and how she’d completely lost interest in her education until recently.
She heard a melodramatic story from him about being brokenhearted by her anger and pronouncement that she’d been a fool to ever trust him. “I wanted to look for you—you wouldn’t have been very hard to find. I really just wanted to be sure you were all right. But then I thought about it and told myself you were better off without the complication of me in your life. My wife wasn’t going to let me go easily. It was going to be a long, drawn-out ordeal. I told myself to just stick to my part of the agreement that I’d get a divorce and when that was done, I’d look for you. It was not an easy time, baby on the way, my wife wanting our marriage and yet so angry with me that she could barely look at me across the table. She threatened to complain to the department head that I’d fraternized with a student, but I guess alimony was more important to her than revenge.
“When the divorce was finally done, I was stripped bare of worldly goods and emotion. It was a very dark time.”
He thought about searching for her, but then realized that after all the pain he’d caused, it was a selfish thing to do. He made the decision to let go of the past and hope she’d found happiness.
“But now we’ve found each other,” he said. “It has to be fate. God has given us a fresh start.”