Page 122 of The Truth About Love

I nod through uncontrollable sobs. I’m sure the makeup I put on when I dressed up for him earlier is now a mess of smudges and murky, black tears.

But I don’t care.

Let him see what this is doing to me.

“I have no other option, Auden.”

He’s crying too. Not quite as violently as I am, but his devastation is clear all the same. I want to pull him into my arms and lay with him on the bed until the end of time.

But I can’t.

“I love you so much, Summer-Raine. I always will.” He sniffs, his hands fisted at his sides as if holding himself back from reaching for me. “I’ll see you everywhere. In the bleeding skies and the sunlight as golden as your hair. I’ll hear your laugh in poetry, I’ll see your smile in the daffodils that grow outside my building. I’ll taste your lips in every peach and smell you in every ocean breeze. The beach is ruined for me now, as is every balcony, every wildflower, every splash of summer rain. And just know, my pretty girl, that whenever you think of me, I’ll be thinking of you too.”

With that, he steps towards me and presses his soft lips to my forehead for the last time. Then he walks away from me forever.

And when I wake the next morning after crying myself to sleep, I find the lavender he’s carried around in his wallet since the day I gave it to him on the floor just outside my front door. Beside it, a few scribbled lines on parchment paper. W H Auden poetry. Of course, it is.

The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;

Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;

Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;

For nothing now can ever come to any good.

Finally, after all this time, Auden Wells is saying goodbye.

Chapter Thirty-three

Auden

A son.

I’m having another son.

But for some reason, whether it’s guilt about having another child after losing Oscar, I don’t know, but I don’t feel connected to this baby at all. And I have this terrible fear that I won’t love him the way that I should.

I know it’s normal to struggle bonding with a baby born after loss, according to Google anyway, but I’m not sure. This feels more than that, but I can’t put my finger on why.

Cara reaches for me from the bed where the sonographer is performing an ultrasound, but I shrug her hand away. Three months it’s been since she told me that she’s pregnant and not once have I allowed her to touch me.

She scowls at me.

“Doesn’t he look handsome already, honey?”

I fake a smile and check the time on my watch.

“I think he looks just like you,” she carries on in that sweet-as-pie voice she uses only when we’re in public.

“He’s the size of a banana.” I scoff. “You can’t possibly tell already.”

“Don’t be boring.” She pouts. “You’re ruining it.”

I sigh and stand up, drying my clammy hands on the front of my pants. “I’m just going to wait outside.”

The sonographer shoots me a judgemental look, but I take no notice. Fuck him. He has no idea of the shit Cara puts me through, of everything I’ve given up for her and the child in her womb.

She’s seething by the time she finds me leaning against the wall of the hospital with a cigarette suspended between my lips.

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