I hovered a hand over the door and knocked. “Sloan, open up.”
The chain raked across the door and the bolt locked.
“Sloan! Come on!” I pressed the doorbell in quick succession.
Nothing.
Un-fucking-believable.
Well this was just perfect. Who was going to make her bed? She couldn’t even wash the dishes. The ones from lunch would probably just get moldy in the living room. And what about dinner? She would starve to death without me. She was being completely unreasonable.
Stuntman looked up at me like he didn’t know what just happened. Neither did I.
I walked out to the car and dropped into the driver’s seat, crossing my arms.
Maybe the back door is unlocked.
Sloan and I had never had a fight before.
I let out a long breath. I got it. I understood her feelings—I did. My best friend was living her nightmare. She was in her own personal hell, and the man I loved was alive and here, and I wouldn’t have him. Of course I could see how that hurt her, how trivial my reasons looked in the face of what she was enduring. It made me feel like shit that she thought I was being petty.
But it didn’t change a thing.
Josh wanted to make a blind, emotional, knee-jerk decision that would alter the rest of his life, and I couldn’t be a part of that. I just couldn’t. Sloan could be pissed at me all she wanted. I was doing the right thing, and sometimes doing the right thing was unpopular, but that didn’t make it wrong. Sometimes you had to be cruel to be kind, and I wasn’t going to be bullied into changing my mind.
I drove home, Sloan’s words pinging painfully around my mind like a ricocheting bullet. They didn’t change anything. But they hurt.
When I got home, I dropped my car keys onto the table in the kitchen and looked around my immaculate house, feeling lost.
What did I do now? I’d always had Sloan. What if she was really serious about this and she wouldn’t see me anymore?
I realized suddenly that I needed her almost as much as she needed me. Taking care of her helped me to stick to my guns with Josh, because even though she was a mess, a mess was something to clean up. And now, without the distraction, the emptiness was overwhelming.
I sat down at the kitchen table and pulled a stack of napkins in front of me and started to straighten them, lining up the corners and chewing on my lip, thinking about my next move.
Okay, maybe what she said about Mom was true. God knows I could spend the rest of my life in therapy working through the shit the Ice Queen put me through. Maybe Mom did fuck me up and I had some self-worth issues. But the cold, hard truth was that I came with too much baggage, and I wasn’t worth the sacrifice Josh would have to make to be with me. I could never give as much as I would take from him. That wasn’t lack of self-esteem. That was just a simple fact.
Maybe Sloan would agree to a deal. I’d talk to someone about some of my issues if she would agree to go to grief counseling. It wasn’t me giving in to Josh like she wanted, but Sloan knew how much I hated therapists, and she’d always wanted me to see someone. I was debating how to pitch this to her when I glanced into the living room and saw it—a single purple carnation on my coffee table.
I looked around the kitchen like I might suddenly find someone in my house. But Stuntman was calm, plopped under my chair. I went in to investigate and saw that the flower sat on top of a binder with the words “just say okay” written on the outside in Josh’s writing.
He’d been here?
My heart began to pound. I looked again around the living room like I might see him, but it was just the binder.
I sat on the sofa, my hands on my knees, staring at the binder for what felt like ages before I drew the courage to pull the book into my lap. I tucked my hair behind my ear and licked my lips, took a breath, and opened it up.
The front page read “SoCal Fertility Specialists.”
My breath stilled in my lungs. What?
He’d had a consultation with Dr. Mason Montgomery from SoCal Fertility. A certified subspecialist in reproductive endocrinology and infertility with the American Board of