Feels like Home (Lake Fisher 2)

Her hand slows its kneading. “This thing we’re doing…is it real?”

I freeze. “What do you mean?”

“It just…” She stops and shakes her head. “I just…I’m not sure if this is real.”

I tilt my head so I can look fully into her face. “Does it feel real to you?”

She nods. “It does. But will it last? Or will we mess it up again?”

“Honestly? I don’t know,” I admit.

“Do you still want to try?” she asks, her voice hesitant.

I nod against her stomach. “I do.”

“This time, I’d like to work harder to talk to you about things,” she says.

“Okay, Bess,” I say slowly. This feels like a trap, but I can’t be sure. “You feel like I’m hard to talk to?”

“No, not that…I think I don’t talk to you enough.” She lays her free hand, the one that’s not rubbing my hair, on her chest. “It’s about me. Not about you.”

I lie there and say nothing, because I’m still not sure if this is a trap.

She gets quiet, but it’s not uncomfortable.

“I need to work on including you in decisions,” I tell her, “instead of making them for us.”

“You mean like the baby decision?” she says, and her hand stops moving on my head.

I nod against her stomach again. “Among other things. It just became easier for me, and better for my morale, if I made the decisions on certain topics. I felt like I could get more done if I just…did it.”

Her hand starts to move again. “Because you knew I would argue with you?”

“Partly. And partly because you would have done anything to get pregnant, including putting your own emotional health at risk.”

“We should have had this talk a long time ago,” she says with a soft sigh, but she keeps petting my head.

“Can I be honest with you? I kind of felt like getting pregnant was your only goal in life. Like you didn’t care about the health of our marriage as long as you got another chance to be pregnant. But every time we lost a pregnancy, I watched the light go a little dimmer in your eyes. And after that last baby, the light went out entirely. That was when I stopped trying. That was when I made that decision for us, that there would be no more pregnancies.” I lift my head and look into her face. “I’m sorry about that.”

“My light went out?” she repeats.

“It got dimmer and dimmer and then it was gone. It was like you were right in front of me but disappearing little by little each day. Then you were gone, and I was all alone.”

“I’m sorry. I never knew that.” She heaves in a breath. “I think you’re right, though.”

I make an exaggerated shocked face at her and she chuckles at me.

“Shut up,” she says. “You’re right. I was on a mission to become a mom and I wasn’t going to let anything stand in my way, including you.”

“I wanted to be on your team, but I couldn’t, not with how hard it was for you.”

“When we became foster parents to that one baby, it was all I could do to look at him.”

We had gone through the classes together, and she fulfilled the requirements to become a foster parent just like I did, but she wasn’t ever really in it to win it.

“I know. You barely looked in his direction, unless you had to.”

“I couldn’t take losing another baby.”