Page 87 of 50 Ways to Win Back Your Lover

Candy Cane is doing wiggly figure eights at my feet, clueless to the volatile energy in the apartment. “Not now, girl,” I say as I approach Delilah.

Candy gets the picture and flops on the floor. Slowly, I take the seat next to Delilah, who hasn’t looked at me or spoken a word. My insides are a shaken-up beer bottle, frothy, CO2 pressurizing, one degree from detonation.

“It’s your story,” she says, flat. “Your life.”

“It’s our story. And I won’t sell it if you don’t want me to. That’s not even why I started it. I actually have no clue why I started it, but once I did, I couldn’t stop. And Sathya needs money for her family, and our publisher’s being difficult, and I don’t want my father’s account of our life to be the only one in the world. So, yes, I want to publish it, but only if you agree. It’s completely up to you. And my family.”

She clasps her hands on her lap and faces me. “I’m not upset you documented our story. It’s breathtaking—the imagery, the way you’ve fantasized all of us with those gorgeous wings. The pain on these panels is agonizing to read, and the story deserves to be told.”

I reach for her clasped hands, but she doesn’t let me thread our fingers together. All I can do is cover her hands with mine. “Then why are you so upset?”

Quiet upset. Eerily frozen upset. The type of upset that’s so deep and severe the temperature in the room drops.

“Because this is your story, E. Not our story. Certainly not mine.” She shakes off my hands and pushes back her chair. “You told me you loved me before you left, and I could barely breathe. I sat down and stared at nothing for a while, because I realized how unfair I’ve been to you. How selfish. I kept putting off telling you what happened to me, assuming there would be a perfect day, a time that wouldn’t destroy you, but that time never came. Then I grabbed your computer, thinking if I wrote it down, it would be easier. I’d read it to you or let you read it, and that would be that. We’d maybe find our way through, or not. I don’t know. Then I saw your story and the ending you wrote, and I just knew there was no way to tell you this without breaking us.”

She means my final storybook ending. The sappy version of us with a happy family, nothing but promise in our future, and she’s sitting there, rigid, telling me that ending isn’t possible.

For the record, I am not okay.

Sadie’s appearance and news shaved off a few layers of my resilience. The way Delilah’s talking, I’m downright terrified.

“Nothing you say will break us. I’m not going anywhere. That ending is a reader’s ending, overdone and overly happy. I don’t for one second think our life will be without hardship. I know better than—”

“I can’t have kids, E.” She stands, clutching her stomach, right over that permanent scar. “I was a mess when you left. Drank too much, blew off curfew, did stupid, reckless things. And there was this night—a party at Billy Rivera’s property—and I got wasted. Messy, stupid drunk. Avett was there and stole my keys, wouldn’t let me drive. So I stormed out, because fuck him. I wouldn’t get in his car and decided to walk home. I don’t remember much after that, but I remember stumbling on the side of the road, seeing the headlights flash.”

I’m on my feet. I don’t remember standing, but I can’t be confined. Can’t sit. Can’t speak. She needs to get this out, and I need to listen to every word. Take her anger and devastation. Take it all so she doesn’t have to continue carrying it alone.

“They say it was good I was so wasted when the car hit me.”

I make an animal sound, grab at the front of my shirt.

“Intoxicated people have a slower reaction time,” she goes on, her voice as stark as her face. “They don’t tense up as much in anticipation of being hurt, and that stretch of road is so dark the driver didn’t see me until it was too late. I was told I looked fine on the outside, but the accident shattered my pelvis. There was internal bleeding. The doctors rushed me into the operating room planning to do damage control, but there were internal lacerations, and the hemorrhaging was extensive. They had to do a hysterectomy to save me.”

“Delilah.” Her name’s a whisper. It’s all I can manage. My head’s filled with violent images of Delilah’s body connecting with a car, going flying, lying on the road, hospital rooms, scalpels, doctors, blood, her ability to have kids ripped from her.

She’s talking again, saying something about recovery taking a year. Relearning to walk, intensive physiotherapy, but I can’t latch on to her words. They float through my head, bumping against the image of the nephew I just met. Desmond’s son he doesn’t know. My father’s words: I had an opportunity and I took it. That man stole my brother’s child and all of Delilah’s future children. He stole and stole and stole and never once apologized for his reckless actions.

There’s a buzz in my ears. A ringing I can’t contain. No, not a ringing. I’m tugging the back of my hair, bent forward at the waist, and I’m screaming. A vicious roar that bounces off the walls and lacerates my throat.

Delilah’s on her knees in front of me, gripping my shins, telling me it’s okay. It’s not. Nothing is, but I’m not the one who lost everything. I got Delilah back. She’ll never get the future she wanted.

“I’m so sorry.” I drop to my knees too, press my forehead to hers, cup the sides of her tearstained face. “I’m so fucking sorry. If I could go back and kill my father, I would. Burn any evidence of him from the earth. Just . . . fuck. Delilah. I don’t know how you dealt with all of that.”

She clutches my wrists, the two of us heaving together. “I’m okay, E,” she says on a hiccuped gasp. “Physically, at least. It was almost a decade ago, but this right now . . .” Agony haunts her eyes as she blinks. “Seeing you like this is why I took so long to tell you. Why I selfishly allowed you back in my life, when I knew how this would go.”

Something darker flashes across her face.

I grip her cheeks tighter, forcing myself to hold it together. She may hate seeing my suffering, just like I hate hearing about hers, but learning about the hell she endured is the true start of us repairing what we lost. Her emotional and physical suffering was deeper than mine, I realize now. She’s monumentally tougher than me to have come through. Most people are tougher than me, but this? To find the strength to go on, build a business, relearn to walk and smile and face life with optimism when she’s lost so much?

She is the winged albatross of my novel, courageous and powerful, able to spread her clipped wings and soar.

I’ll rewrite those panels. Hold her and listen and absorb every painful minute of her ordeal, give her story the darkness and devastation it deserves—and the inspiring perseverance. Show her I understand the horrors she’s been through. Show her everything will be okay. Prove I don’t care that we can’t have kids of our own.

That deeper catharsis will start another day. Tonight I’ll stay instead of driving to Houston. Bury my anger and devastation and be her rock. Then I’ll meet with my family and upend their worlds once again.

I stroke my trembling thumbs down her cheeks. “Something happened concerning Des.” Drama I don’t want to heap onto Delilah’s shoulders at a time like this. “I need to go back to Houston tomorrow, but I’ll stay tonight and come back as quickly as possible. Promise I’ll be less of a mess by then.”

“You don’t understand.” She jerks her forehead away from mine, her jaw firming in a way I don’t like. “When I said I knew how this would go, I wasn’t just talking about your emotional reaction. I knew this would be the end of us. There’s no going forward from here.”