his child? Knowing we would never have a biological child together? Did he laugh at me when we decided that we were going to adopt, all the while knowing he had a child of his own?”
As soon as I let the words fall from my mouth, I pressed my lips together and looked at Beckett. I hadn’t meant to say any of that. Not really. I had just confessed to the guy I was semi-dating, the guy I had just slept with that I most likely couldn’t have children.
I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t do anything. “Please, go,” I whispered. “Just go.”
He looked at me then, but he didn’t leave.
Chapter 20
Beckett
My brain wanted to catch up, and I let out a deep breath before moving forward and cupping Eliza’s face.
“Eliza,” I whispered.
“No, don’t. Don’t try to make me feel better. I just…I need to breathe through it. I need to be by myself.”
“I could leave,” I said softly. “Or we can just breathe. Let’s breathe.”
She pressed her lips together, and I had a funny thought that she was holding her breath to spite me.
I slid my thumbs along her cheekbones and continued holding her. “Stop.”
“You’re telling me to breathe, and then you’re telling me to stop breathing?”
I closed my eyes. I knew she was in pain, but I needed to make sure that she would be okay. “Do you think you’re asking me to leave because you don’t want to think about what you just told me?”
“I can’t believe I just said all of that out loud.”
“You don’t have to go into details. I would never ask you to do that. But you don’t need to feel embarrassed or whatever, either. Only angry at that asshole for what he did to you. Maybe I shouldn’t speak ill of the dead, but he was a fucking asshole for doing this to you.”
“He really was,” she muttered.
“Talk to me,” I whispered.
“What is there to say? Marshall got his perfect baby. He got a child, a woman he loved—and it wasn’t me. I didn’t know anything about it. I was so secure in our marriage, even if we might’ve had problems. I just brushed them under the rug because we didn’t really have problems. All marriages have problems. Ours were the same.”
“It’s not your fault.”
“It might not be my fault that he cheated on me, but it is my fault for not seeing it.”
“I didn’t know your husband well, but I wouldn’t have thought he could do something like this.”
“Apparently, I didn’t know him as well as I thought, either. But his parents did. They must have if they so readily believed that this Natasha had given them a grandchild.”
“That’s on them. That’s not on you, Eliza.”
“I know. Intellectually, I know. But that doesn’t make it any easier on my heart or my brain when I’m trying to sleep. It was always a thing for Marshall, though. Do you know what I mean?”
I shook my head but lowered my hands to grip hers. “Explain. If you can.”
“I’ve known for a while that I would have trouble having children. I’m still on birth control to help regulate my system, but I have endometriosis and a bunch of other lovely things that make it very difficult to conceive. I’ve known this since I was a teenager. My freshman year of college, they explained it to me over and over again. And I mourned. And then I realized that there are many ways to have children if that is something a person wants to do. I’ve had years to come to terms with this. And so did Marshall. For as long as he knew me, he knew I might not be able to give him a child. At least not one that we conceived together. In the end, he got his baby, didn’t he?”
“Eliza,” I whispered.
“He got his baby. I thought we were fine with the fact that even if I went off birth control and the pain came back full force, that my chances would be really small because my uterus is trying to kill me.”
I held back a wince at that. Not at her words, but at the pain in them. The rage.
I knew Paige had had similar issues when she was younger, but I didn’t know the full extent of it. She had my mother and Annabelle to speak to, and I had only been there to hold her hand when she was crying during certain times of the month. Maybe I needed to