Lillie wasn’t as willing to go there with him. Her own wound was too raw. Would always be too raw. The way Kirk had summoned her to his office in her advanced state of pregnancy, hearing that he was having a healthy son while she carried the one who would most likely not live to see his childhood...
Her foot came down on a little rock on the path and she stumbled. Kirk grabbed her elbow and steadied her. Held on.
She pulled her arm away.
“The truth is,” he continued with a look of sorrow on his face, “I lost it the day I heard about Braydon. I couldn’t do it, Lil. I wasn’t as strong as you. As good as you. I just didn’t have what it took to go through the pregnancy, the birth, only to have him die.”
In fairness, she hadn’t been sure she had what it took, either, except that she’d had no choice. The baby had been inside of her. Wherever she went, he went.
Until he didn’t.
“At first, I was in denial. The doctor was wrong. Or the problem wasn’t what they’d first thought. But as your pregnancy progressed, as they did more tests, the situation only got worse and was further confirmed.”
“Papa told you that?” Because Kirk had certainly not been there himself. Not since the first day they’d heard there was a problem.
“The doctor told me that. I went to see her after every one of your appointments.”
He
r head jerking to the side, Lillie stared at him. “She never told me that.”
Was this another of Kirk’s tricks? A way to insinuate himself back into her heart—her life?
“I told her not to,” Kirk said. “At that point I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to be the husband you deserved and needed me to be, and I figured the one decent thing I could do, rather than popping in and out of your life, was to leave you alone.”
It might have been nice if she’d had a say in that decision. While, ultimately, their marriage would have ended, it still would have been nice to have had Braydon’s father around to share the unique burden they’d been given.
At least she would have had someone to talk to who really understood.
Who cared about the baby as much as she did.
“I’m not proud of myself, Lil. At all. But if I’m going to get anything right in my life, I have to be honest with you. After I was sure Bray wasn’t going to get any better, I told myself that it was meant to be that way. And that my life would still be just as great as I’d always envisioned. I could move on to have the family I was meant to have.”
To Leah. He’d moved on to Leah.
And had Ely.
Lillie had seen pictures of the boy. When she’d visited Papa and Gayle. At first, they’d removed all signs of their grandson whenever they knew she was coming over. But when she’d stopped in unannounced one day and seen the photos, she’d told them they didn’t have to hide them.
That, in fact, it was wrong, unfair to an innocent little boy, for them to deny his existence in any way.
“Ely looks like you,” she said now. “He’s got Leah’s light coloring, but he has your bone structure. Your nose and mouth.”
Shoulders hunched, Kirk shook his head. It took a moment for her to realize he was crying again.
“I never saw my son, Lil. He was on this earth for sixteen days, fighting for his life, and I wasn’t there. He never heard my voice.”
It was something he was going to have to live with for the rest of his life. They both knew that.
“There was nothing you could have done,” she had to tell him.
Because the one thing Lillie couldn’t bear was to allow someone to suffer if she could help alleviate their distress.
“There were no tough decisions to make, Kirk. No choices. They did everything they could, but he didn’t have enough of a heart to sustain him and its absence had already affected his other organs too much to allow for any possibility of a transplant. He arrived. He lived sixteen days. And he left us.”
“But you held him.”
The picture. The one on the gravestone that Kirk had just minutes ago lifted by himself from his car to place on the ground above their son’s tiny casket.