Semua Bab My Ex-Husband Begged to Come Back, But I Already Said ‘I Do’: Bab 1 - Bab 5

Two pink lines.That's all it took to change everything, for about eleven minutes.I stood in the bathroom of our brownstone with the test shaking in my hand, and I laughed. An actual, out-loud, hand-over-my-mouth laugh, the kind you can't stop once it starts. Two years. Two years of charts and thermometers and appointments that ended with doctors telling us to *just relax, it'll happen.*It happened.I didn't bother changing out of my work clothes. I didn't grab my coat. I just ran.New York in October smells like rain on concrete and roasted chestnuts from the cart on the corner, and I barely noticed any of it, because all I could think was *Max, Max, Max.* I pictured his face. I pictured him picking me up and spinning me the way he used to, before the promotion, before the late nights, before I started falling asleep alone more often than not.I took the brownstone steps two at a time.My hand was still shaking when I pushed through the front door, and I heard voices upstairs, Max

Daylight felt wrong on my skin.That was the first thing I noticed when they finally opened that door: not relief, not even fear anymore, just the strange, sick shock of sunlight after two days of a single yellow bulb. My eyes watered. My legs nearly gave out on the stairs going up. Nobody offered a hand.They walked me back into the house like nothing had happened. Like I hadn't spent two nights on a stained mattress nursing a split lip with the hem of my shirt.Max was waiting in the living room.He stood by the window with his hands in his pockets, and for one stupid heartbeat, some small, wrecked part of me hoped he'd run to me the way he used to. That he'd take one look at my face and fall apart with guilt.He didn't move.He just looked at me. Up and down, slow, like he was inspecting something he was disappointed in."You caused this to yourself." His voice was calm. That was the part that scared me, how calm it was, like he was stating the weather. "Trying to kill Elena's baby

I came out of the bathroom to the sound of his breathing already gone slow and heavy.Max was sprawled across the bed, one arm hanging off the edge, mouth slightly open, dead to the world the way only a man with no idea what he's just lost can sleep. I stood in the doorway for a second and watched him, waiting to feel something. Anger. Grief. Anything.I felt nothing at all.That scared me more than the anger ever had.I went back to my own room, technically still ours, but I'd stopped thinking of it that way somewhere around the second night on a concrete floor, and sat on the edge of the bed in the dark.I hadn't cried in two days.I hadn't let myself, not really, not since the hospital. There'd been too much to survive in between: the locked room, the slap, the performance of a wife who wanted her marriage back, and grief doesn't wait politely for a convenient moment. It just gets shoved down further and further until you don't know where to find it anymore.I still hadn't grieved