I stayed there for a few minutes, then got up and got myself together. I couldn’t let Mary see me like this, so I washed my face and waited a little while for my eyes to stop being quite so red. I walked slowly back to the station and slumped back down in my chair.
“You okay?” Mary asked when she joined me a few minutes later. “You look like hell.”
“I’m fine,” I said. “You know how this place can be.”
She nodded, eyes distant. “I sure do, sweetheart. You want to talk about it?”
“Not at all.”
She sat down next to me and didn’t say anything more—and I knew she wouldn’t gossip about this.
There was an unspoken understanding between everyone that worked at Mercy. The hospital was a force of nature in itself, and it could get the better of anyone, at any time, for any reason. Sometimes you broke down, had a good cry, and moved on, and everyone learned not to ask too many questions. Mary might’ve been a gossip, but she understood how things went around here. One day, I’d return that favor to her, I was sure of it.
I leaned back in my chair and thought of Dean back in that room, telling me he didn’t care about having kids—and only cared about me. Maybe he meant it, and maybe it was true, but it wouldn’t always be. If he wanted kids, even a little bit, sooner or later he’d resent me for being unable to give him any, and we’d never be able to get past it. I knew it’d happen, whether he thought it would or not, and I wasn’t going to let whatever we had get ruined because I was too broken.
So I’ll let it go. I’ll mourn it for a while, and think about that night fondly, but I’ll move on because I’m strong, and because I’ve gotten used to living with myself like this. We’ll fight Maria, and maybe we’ll win or maybe we won’t, but the relationship has to be over.
Otherwise, I don’t know what I’ll do, or how I can live with myself.20DeanI kept thinking about Fiona, about the way she spoke to me in that room, but most of all about the hurt in her eyes, the pain in her expression, and it killed me.
She had no clue, no clue at all. Whatever happened that caused her to be unable to have children so clearly defined everything she did. She lived her life assuming that she was broken, and that nobody could love her because she was flawed in that one specific way—and yet I couldn’t care less about that.
Having kids wasn’t the most important thing in the world. I didn’t need her to be able to carry my babies, and even if that was something we both agreed we wanted one day, there were so many other options, like surrogates or adoption. Her being unable to have children was such a small thing, such a minor problem, and yet standing in that room with her, watching the way she spoke about herself, the way she looked at me, I could tell that in her mind it was her defining quality.
I didn’t know how to convince her that it simply wasn’t that important to me, that I cared about her way more than I cared about having children with her. Sharing a life together—that was something I wanted.
I gave her space. Even though I wanted to hunt her down that day and tell her exactly how I felt, wanted to find her and convince her to listen, I kept away and focused on my job. I lost myself in work, or at least I tried to, even if she was still on my mind, still lingering in the back of my mind every second of every day.
Obviously, I couldn’t let it last. She didn’t show up for a ride home that night, and the next morning she didn’t come out when I called or knocked. Part of me was worried until I got a text from her. — Don’t worry, already at the hospital.
I knew what she was doing. She meant it when she said she wanted this to be over, that she thought it needed to end, and now she was putting herself in danger to put distance between us. The rides to and from work weren’t only for fun and because I liked being with her, but because those thugs might make a move on her at any moment, and I couldn’t allow that to happen.
And yet now that she was pulling away, I couldn’t protect her.
I had to do something. I knew I needed to give her space and to let her figure this out on her own, but I couldn’t sit by and let something bad happen. I got to the hospital, got myself prepped for the day, then went looking for her before I had to go do rounds.