She tossed the towel down and turned back to him. “I didn’t know it would be this long. You know that. It was supposed to just be two weeks. And you think this is easy for me—to spend my days accompanied by two little reminders of what my body can’t do? My sister, who didn’t even want kids in the first place, can do it perfectly. You think I wanted that thrown in my face all summer?”
She pushed past him into the bedroom. Rain slapped the windows and pounded the roof like a thousand tiny fists. She stood in the center of the room with her back to Ty, her hands clenched, her fingernails digging into her palms.
“I’m sick of wanting,” she said. “I want to be able to go through my days like you do, with all the crap from the last two years gone and behind me. I’m tired of wanting something I can’t have—wanting it so badly I can’t breathe sometimes.”
A sharp cry from the girls’ room pierced the air and they both stopped, waiting. Betsy pleaded in her mind for the cry to come again so she could escape the suffocation of the room and the storm swirling in her heart and mind, looking for a place to make landfall. But nothing came. Just quiet.
She sat on the bed, tucked her hands under her thighs. Neither of them spoke. The quiet stretched so long she finally looked up at him, but she couldn’t read his face.
“That’s what all this has been about?” he asked. “Us not having kids?”
Betsy made a sound that was supposed to have been a laugh, but it came out somewhere between a cry and a snort. “All? You say it like it’s nothing. Like it’s not everything.”
Ty knelt on the floor in front of her so their faces were at eye level. “That’s the thing, Bets. It can’t be everything. I get it. It’s disappointing, it hurts, it’s not what we imagined for our life.” He stopped, looked down, and swallowed hard. “But whatever happens or doesn’t happen in our life, I’m here to stay.”
He reached up and ran his hand through his wet hair. “When things get rough, we have to deal with it. We talk, we fight, then we make it okay. We make it better. That’s what we do. But it has to be both of us together.”
In the glow from the lamp on the other side of the room, Betsy could see every tired line around Ty’s eyes, each freckle across his nose, the patch of gray hair at his temples. She wanted to believe his words. Wanted to soak in his strength and pain, his joy and sadness, and let them carry her.
He rested his forehead on her knees for a moment, then sat on the bed next to her. “You have no idea how much it kills me not to be able to give you children, to do something to make it happen for you. For us. But I wanted you long before kids were even a thought in my mind, and that hasn’t changed.” He put his hands on the sides of her face. “It doesn’t matter if we have a dozen kids one day or if in forty years it’s just me and you, sitting in our rocking chairs out front. You are enough for me.”
She breathed in all of him, deep into her lungs. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I should have asked you about Jenna and the girls. And I should have talked to you about all this before it boiled over.”
He shook his head. “You said you were good, and it seemed like things got somewhat back to normal.” He stopped, hung his head, and rubbed his forehead. “You know what though? I knew you weren’t okay. Deep down, I knew. But it seemed easier, better for you somehow, if I just let it go. Or maybe that’s a cop-out too. Maybe it was just easier for me.”
“It’s better that you did let it go. Before tonight, I probably would have said I was fine. I thought everything was good. In my mind, I’d moved on, but having Addie and Walsh here . . .”
“I know.”
“But it’s been good too, in a way. Hasn’t it?” She looked up at him.
He nodded. “We’re going to be okay.”
She leaned her head on his shoulder and he wrapped his arm around her, kissed her head.
“It’s late,” he whispered after a moment. “Let’s go to bed.”
Under the sheets with the lights off, they remained on their own sides of the bed, as if separately digesting their argument, mentally rehashing all that had been said. It felt good to let some things out in the open, but Betsy knew there was more to come. She wanted to turn to him, to curl herself around him, but she didn’t. Finally, she turned to her side and closed her eyes. Sometime later, he rolled toward her, the warmth of his body radiating into her back. Then she could sleep.
twenty-seven
Jenna
Jenna sat at a corner table and rested her laptop on her knees. Out the window the afternoon sun glimmered on the Gulf waters, just across the street from the coffee shop. Halcyon may not have offered Wi-Fi, but that didn’t stop the artists from seeking it out on their own when necessary, and Sunset Coffee was the closest place that offered a steady stream of Internet connectivity.
She tapped her fingers on the smooth cover of her laptop. Since mentioning her old Etsy shop to Gregory that first week in the darkroom, she hadn’t been able to quit thinking about it. She’d once had several hundred people following her site—both loyal customers who came to her whenever they had
