Page 57 of Like First Love, Again

She took a breath and then another, visualizing the fresh oxygen revitalizing her blood cells the way Marigold had taught her.

When you notice yourself spiraling, come back to where your body is.Marigold’s voice echoed in her head.Pick something to touch. Something to smell. Something to hear.

It was all about grounding herself, Marigold explained. To fight the instinct to flee from herself and instead, remain present. Practicing staying in her body after having depleted every drop of energy she’d ever had, Mia closed her eyes. She listened to the soft whoosh of the AC. Felt the stitching on the steering wheel. Inhaled the faint scent of citrus air freshener. She noticed the way her chest rose then fell until her muscles relaxed.

Before she started back across town, she picked up her phone.

Mia:I survived.This whole therapy thing might be okay. I can’t wait to talk later tonight. I KNOW you’re killing the game and selling all the things. Miss you.

Tori didn’t answer right away, and Mia hadn’t expected her to. Tori was at an important meeting with a builder looking to erect some kind of monstrosity at the edge of South Miami. Mia wouldn’t have messaged her at all until she was finished with her meeting, and then a business dinner with a different client,but Tori had insisted she send her proof of life after running an emotional gauntlet.

By the time Mia put her car in drive, she had the audacity to feel a little hopeful. The thought was so fragile she didn’t dare touch it. She just let it cling to meager life in her chest.

She was thinking about Tori and wishing she was driving to her place instead. Wishing that she could wait for her to come home while tucked under her sheets, half watching TV. When she pulled up to her house, parallel parking between a dog groomer van and landscaping truck, she was in full daydream mode.

Debating whether thinking about the future she wanted counted as avoidance, she put her key in the door. When she pushed it open, Mia was confronted with the ghost of everything that wasn’t.

“We need to talk,” Eric said.

Twenty-Nine

“Ithought you were working tonight,” Mia said, like that might change the fact that Eric was standing in the living room rather than the hospital.

“When I saw you were back, I switched with Antoine,” he replied with infinite patience rather than calling her out for being a childish coward like she deserved. “I can’t say I’m thrilled to feel like I’m ambushing you in our home.” His kind face was lined with regret.

Mia took a long, slow breath. She wanted to be more prepared for this, to talk about things in a way that didn’t cause more damage to either of them. To run her messy thoughts by Marigold. But a critical realization hit her hard. There would never be a comfortable time to put a marriage to rest. To bury it along with all of the broken dreams and misplaced hope.

“I just didn’t know how else to?—”

“I know,” Mia whispered, irritated eyes stinging when she blinked for too long. “This is my fault.” She dropped her purse on the table and stepped inside.

Sitting on the couch, Mia tucked a leg under herself to face Eric. He sat close but not too close, looking at her like he wastrying to figure out what had changed about her. A new haircut? A new shade of red?

“I looked for the divorce papers when I got back,” Mia said, because she didn’t know where the hell to start. She’d fallen out of practice after months of silence. After they’d dropped the D-word and broken apart, they’d never managed to come back together. Even as friends. “Do you want me to email your lawyer, or?—”

Eric shook his head, attention trained on his rubber clogs. She’d always hated those things, yet felt strangely sad that she wouldn’t see them anymore. “We can go over them later. They’re in the bedroom.”

Mia wanted to make a joke that he’d hidden them in the only place she wouldn’t check, but she couldn’t make her mouth move. A silence settled between them, heavy but not hostile. Just full. Full of everything they hadn’t said and everything they didn’t need to say anymore.

“I’m sorry,” Mia said finally, her voice low. “I’m sorry I broke this. That I broke us.” The sentiment was insufficient. Incomplete.

“You didn’t.” Eric scooted closer like he’d debated reaching out for her before thinking better of it. “We tried, Mia. We really did.”

Her throat tightened like her esophagus wanted to stop her from talking. “You were always so patient with me.” She put her hand to her abdomen and forced herself to look Eric in the face. She hadn’t asked Marigold how to put her feelings into words. “I just—I couldn’t stop trying to make it work.” She fisted her shirt like rending garments might help translate the aching pit in her gut into words. “Even after it stopped making sense.” She swallowed but it did nothing to improve her dry mouth. “And I can see that it was selfish. What it was doing to us was—” She shook her head. “I was just so sure that if I could succeed, thenall the pain would have been worth it. But all I did was destroy everything.”

“You can’t put all of this blame on yourself.” Eric looked down at his hands as if gathering himself before looking at her with so much heartbreak in his eyes it was suffocating. “I’m sorry that I lost sight of you. That I put my head down and believed you would be right there when I looked up. That somehow everything would just…” He threw up his hands in the universal sign for helplessness. “Solve itself.”

“I wasn’t looking at you either,” Mia admitted, grimacing at how singularly focused on getting pregnant she’d been. How it had turned into something she wanted to the exclusion of everything else. And when she realized that meant losing her marriage, too… It was too late. “I was just so sure that a baby would fix it.”

Eric gazed at her with shame creeping into his expression. “I’m sorry that I got so frustrated with you. So angry.” He picked at his cuticles, his only nervous habit. “I wanted to move on. And I took that out on you.”

Since they were admitting terrible things, Mia didn’t hold back. “And I resented you for that,” she said for the first time to anyone. Even herself. “You went away and escaped into work and I couldn’t. It was my body, and I couldn’t get away from it. But I couldn’t stop wanting it.” Her limbs turned heavy with exhaustion. “I was so angry at you.”

Eric’s jaw flexed, but he didn’t argue. “Everything dies if you don’t feed it,” he said. “I should’ve thrown myself into you, not work.” He blinked hard. A single tear fell, then another. “I’m sorry we broke each other. In a million years, I would never have thought I could leave you alone with so much.” His voice shattered more than it cracked. “That I’d turn my back?—”

Mia reached for his hand, squeezed it once. Then, without thinking, she leaned forward and pulled him into a hug.

“We were doing what we could to survive, Eric. I’m just sorry that it cost us so much.”

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