Page 201 of Filthy Promises

Not dramatic sobs or wailing. Just a lone, silent tear tracking down his face.

“I can’t lose you,” he whispers. “Neither of you. I won’t survive it.”

Without thinking, I reach for him, pulling him toward me until he climbs up into the bed at my side. He comes willingly, though even now, he’s careful not to entangle himself with the tubes of my IVs.

“You’re not going to lose us,” I promise, my fingers threading through his silver-streaked hair. “I’m too stubborn to die, remember?”

A broken laugh escapes him. “You are that.”

“And our baby is half you, half me. That’s some pretty stubborn DNA.”

His arms tighten around me. “When I saw the blood on your dress…” He shudders. “In that moment, nothing else mattered. Just you.”

“We’re going to be okay,” I say again, pressing a kiss to the top of his head. “All three of us.”

He lifts his head to look at me. For a long time, he does just that.

Then he sighs, and with that whistling exhale go fragments of the grief that’s been studded into his heart like shards of broken glass.

Not all of it.

But some.

It’s a start.

“Rest,” he urges. “The doctor said you need it.”

“Only if you take the other bed. You look worse than I do, and I’m the one in the hospital gown.”

“Bossy little thing,” he scolds playfully, “even from a gurney.”

“You knew what you were getting into when you married me.”

“I did,” he agrees. “I still do.”

As he reluctantly moves to the other bed, I let loose a grief-tinged sigh of my own.What a fucking wedding day.I didn’t even know if I’d show up at all. Then I did, and I said vows that I truly meant. Then I almost lost our baby. Then my husband cried.

It’s not exactly a typical order of operations.

So it’s unclear what I’m supposed to do next. Some couples make love all night long on their wedding days. Some fall asleep with cake frosting still buzzing sweetly on their tongue.

My husband and I fall asleep in adjacent hospital beds, our hands interlaced to bridge the dark, endless space between us.

I’m not ready to forgive everything quite yet. There’s too much baggage to simply jettison it all at once.

But just like Vince’s grief, I find myself relinquishing my grip on pieces of it. It slips through my fingers like sand.

As sleep finally rises up to claim me, my free hand drifts to my stomach, where our child still grows, still fights, still lives. “We’re going to be okay,” I whisper again, though I’m not sure if I’m reassuring the baby, Vince, or myself.

Maybe all three of us need to hear it.

58

VINCE

I never thought I’d find peace in the simple act of reading aloud.

Yet here I am, seated beside Rowan’s bed, working my way through some romance novel she insisted would “expand my emotional vocabulary.”

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