Getting Real (Getting Some 3)

“So did I.”

A smile pulls at my lips. “I remember wondering if I had anything sharp enough in the truck to cut the umbilical cord.”

Stacey looks over at me, smiling a little.

“You never told me that.”

I shrug. “Didn’t seem worth mentioning after the fact.”

“We should’ve known then that he was going to be the one to turn us gray,” she says. “Give us all the wrinkles.”

“Definitely.” I nod.

And then we fall silent again.

But the memory of those shared moments hovers between us, linking us together, pulling us closer than we’ve been in years.

“I don’t want to fight with you anymore, Stacey.”

My words are gentle, but resolute. Because something has to give.

“It’s bad for the boys . . . it’s bad for us.”

“I know.” She nods tightly, gazing at our son.

“When they brought Aaron in after the accident, he wanted me to tell you that he doesn’t hate you.” My eyes burn, remembering his words. “Not even a little.”

Stacey’s chest hitches and her mouth pinches to contain a sob. She brings the tissue squeezed in her hand to her eyes.

“I know you think I’m a shitty dad, that I was a rotten husband—and I’m sorry for whatever I did to make you believe that. But we have to move on. To have things be . . . peaceful between us. We have to find a way to do that. I want to raise our boys to be good men and I want us to do it together. They need us to do it together.”

Her voice is raw and scraping.

“I don’t think you’re a shitty dad, Connor. And you were never a bad husband.”

After a quiet moment, she scrapes her teeth against her bottom lip, and her words come out soft, like a confession.

“Did you ever think . . . that we got married for all the wrong reasons? Like, we’d been together through college and then we graduated, and it was just expected that we take the next step?”

“Yeah, I have thought that,” I say, my voice soft too. “But I don’t regret it. We have the kids . . . ”

“I don’t regret it either.” She looks over at me, her face gentle. Unguarded.

And it’s like I’m looking back in time. Finally talking to the girl I knew . . . the person I used to love.

“Everything just went so fast,” she says. “There was never any time . . . and one day I woke up and I was thirty-eight. And I . . . couldn’t breathe. Because my life was rushing by and nothing about it was what I thought it was going to be. What I wanted it to be.”

She inhales deeply, rubbing her palms on her jeans.

“It’s hard to admit that when you have kids. Scary. So I blamed you for it. Because that made it easier to change it. To upend the boys’ lives and blow our family apart.”

I’ve wondered about this for so long. I knew we had issues—our marriage was never perfect—but her insistence on getting divorced took me by surprise.

“And then, this last year,” she goes on, “it’s like I went crazy on only having to worry about myself. I knew the boys were with you. That they were safe and happy, that you would take care of them. And I got to think about me. It had been so long, Connor, since I was able to only think about me. It’s like I was drunk on it. The freedom of it. It felt like I was twenty-five again.”

She glances my way.

“You probably can’t understand that.”

When we were married, Stacey took care of the details, the small things.

All of them.

The appointments, school paperwork, homework, schedules, playdates. The laundry and food shopping and housework. Even when we took vacations, she booked the hotel, reserved the flights, the rental car, packed the boys’ suitcases.

I only had to pack mine. All the other stuff was just . . . taken care of.

Because I was working. Because my mind was on my patients—on becoming and being a doctor. And when I was home, I just wanted to spend time with the kids, with her. I needed that.

“I don’t know if I would’ve understood it then, but I get it now,” I tell her. “And I knew you were unhappy . . . in the end. But I was so tired of trying, and fighting. I just . . . stopped caring. It’s fucked up.”

“It wouldn’t have mattered. You couldn’t save us, like one of your patients. You couldn’t fix us, Connor.”

“I know. But it’s still wrong. You were my wife, the mother of my kids . . . I should’ve cared.” I look her in the eyes, my voice low and my words true. “I’m sorry.”

She nods softly, sadly.

“I’m sorry too. For so much.”

Stacey’s gaze drifts back to Aaron. “And I’ve been sitting here thinking of all that time I’ll never get back with them. With Aaron. And I’ve been praying—I’ve been praying, please, God, take me instead.”