Page 138 of Push

The pages went on…and on…

It was around here that Kayleigh had a coffee waiting for me when I got to work.

And then…

This was the first time Kayleigh asked me to go to the coffee shop with her. She said I needed a break.

I did.

You weren’t sleeping because NoBo thought nights were for dancing in your belly, so I wasn’t sleeping, either. I was zonked.

Kayleigh said she’d buy me a coffee every day if it made me happy. She did after that.

It was the same. Over and over. Coffee shop. Break room. A walk here or there. Boring conversations about nothing and Toby acting utterly oblivious despite the fact the woman had clearly fallen head over heels for him.

I skimmed his notes until I landed on an entry when Noah was about a month old.

You called. Mrs. Peterson was numbed up, but she was carrying on like I was murdering her. She’s a nervous patient. She nearly bit my finger off once! You kept calling. I was worried something was wrong. I asked Kayleigh to answer my phone to let you know I was halfway through a root canal.

She said you told her it wasn’t anything urgent. She sounded like she was being nice.

God, I wish I’d answered the stupid phone myself. I don’t think I called you back, either. I should have called you back. You didn’t talk to me when I came home. You weren’t fine, were you? You needed me, and I wasn’t there.

I pushed my fist into the hollow ache in my chest. I didn’t remember the day as clearly as Toby. All the days I’d called him and Kayleigh had answered were stirred together in one big pot of misery.

Toby shuffled closer and pecked a kiss on the shoulder of my T-shirt. “You still okay?”

“No.” It was hard reading about those days. Noah was a perfect baby, but I was so unhappy…and so lonely. “But I need to keep going.”

And I did.

I bumped into Kayleigh in the treatment room. It was an accident. Sometimes it’s hard to get around all the crap in there. She stumbled, and it was just a split-second thing where I stuck my arm out to grab her before she fell over.

And she was being all weird about it, breathing like she’d run a marathon or something, and then she said, “Toby, you saved me.”

I think I said, “Sorry.”

Then, Toby listed more coffee shop trips and a few near misses in the break room. Kayleigh had an interesting habit of cornering him in there, the little witch.

I came into work dead on my feet. Kayleigh asked me if I was okay. Gwen, I wasn’t. I was miserable. I didn’t understand why you’d been mad at me for two days.

I told Kayleigh I wasn’t sleeping well and whinged that the couch was shit for my back. That’s true—that couch looks great, but it is NOT made for sleeping.

Kayleigh said she’d never make me sleep on the couch. I didn’t say anything.

That’s worse, isn’t it? I shouldn’t have been talking about that stuff with her. I should’ve tried harder to talk to you and listened to the warnings you were giving me.

Where would we be now if I had?

I scrubbed a hand over my eyes. The tears were embarrassing. This was the worst possible time to show any weakness, and Toby didn’t miss it. He launched across the room to grab the box of tissues off the dressing table. He ripped some free as he lumbered back, eyes on the floor, his face scrunched up. He crouched in front of me. The wad of tissues lifted, but his eyes didn’t. A sniffle of his nose was hastily swiped away with the back of his hand.

“I’m okay,” I lied, waving away the tissues. “This is just…” Hard. So freaking hard. “I’ll keep going.”

His Adam’s apple bobbed as he nodded. He climbed back on the bed beside me, his arm wrapping around my waist and his nose resting in the crook of my shoulder. Solidarity. We were in this mess together until the end.

I read every painful word—all the missed calls, all the times Toby had fobbed me off while Kayleigh had skipped around the treatment room like a breath of fresh air compared to the wife who ignored him at home.

Finally, I landed on the page that started it all—the night of the accident. I flicked ahead through the pages. It kept going… And going…

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