he appeared on Friday. “Who is she?”
He shakes his head. “I never left town. One of Hayes’s friends is a urologist. He performed a reverse vasectomy. I stayed in Beacon’s studio so I could recover. I didn’t want to tell you until I knew it was successful, but…”
He sighs deeply while closing his eyes for a couple of beats.
My pulse accelerates. He’s not making sense. “Why would you do that?”
“Because I want to give you everything you want,” he says, his voice cracking. “Not that I can. The success rate is low. It’s been twelve years, and the probabilities for the sperm to return is seventy-five percent. For a pregnancy to occur, it is less than forty percent successful. We won’t know for a year. The doctor said I had a shitty job done. He’s not even sure they did it right.”
He laughs, “That’s what I get for letting a med student do it to avoid the insurance costs and my mom finding out.”
“Wait, was it illegal?”
He shakes his head. “No, it was done at a hospital, but it was cheap because I let the students watch the procedure while a student performed it with the supervision of their teacher.”
Sometimes I think that young Pierce wasn’t as cautious as this man. I wish I had met him then, but I was in a terrible place, and maybe we would’ve destroyed each other. Not that meeting later gave us the best results.
“There are other options,” I offer, because we want the same thing, don’t we? Why now and not before?
He nods, takes off his wedding band, and hands it to me.
“You deserve better than what you got in the first round,” he states, while delicately, he takes my ring off too and puts it in his pocket. He grunts. “When you described our wedding to my brothers, I was ashamed about how poorly I treated us. You deserved better than tacos and a poorly executed impromptu wedding.”
“I should’ve said something, but I was afraid to ask for what I wanted,” I confess. “What if you’d leave because I needed more?” A tear rolls down my cheek. “And you left when I did.”
“No, I left long before that,” he corrects me. “I disconnected from us when I was told that my promotion was at risk. The day my grandfather and mother said, ‘You do what we say, or you’re out. Edward will become the first partner over you.’”
“That’s when we got married,” I mutter.
He nods. “You’re important to me. My entire world. Which is why I want you to have everything. The proposal, the ring, the wedding of your dreams, whatever that means. We never talked about what you wanted. We both know what you need, a loving husband who puts you first and makes you feel like there’s no one else in this world but you.”
My chest tightness. I don’t want to lose him, but he makes so much sense it’d be stupid to say, Why not you? Ask me to stay. Why are you doing this?
Because he’s never loved you enough.
“I want to deserve you,” he answers my silent question. “You want a clean slate.”
“Why not try without the divorce?”
He shakes his head again. “I need us to be sure of each other. I’m slow, but I can grasp more than I did before. I know you came to Baker’s Creek with me to make sure I adapt. You have a new life planned. I am not going to stop you just because I think I deserve a chance. I want to earn it. I let you get the divorce at your own pace because it was the least I could do. I’m fine. You can leave, Ley.”
“This was new for you,” I agree. “You were taught to treat your family as rivals. This environment seemed difficult to navigate for you. What if you saw it as a challenge and not as an opportunity?”
“See, that confirms my fears, or maybe it doesn’t. I’m afraid that I’m one of those half-dead animals you need to save. I want to be the man of your dreams,” he states. “I need you to be sure of what I mean to you, and also if you’ll ever get past what I did to you. I’m so fucking sorry for everything.”
“I know,” I say. “I’m sorry for what I did to you after you asked for the divorce.”
“It wasn’t bad, and after the anger faded, I laughed at how crafty you can be when you’re