Lost Along the Way(38)

“I don’t have anything to say to you. This is unforgivable,” Meg said.

“I don’t know, Meg. There’s nothing I can do about it now. And even if I could, I wouldn’t. So you’re going to have to find some way to forgive me. I’m sorry. I really am. I didn’t want you to find out this way.”

“How’d you want me to find out?”

“I didn’t want you to find out at all,” Cara admitted.

The words stung. She was insulted that after years of telling Cara everything about her struggles, her friend had kept this secret from her.

“I have to go,” Meg whispered as she stood and grabbed her purse off the back of her chair.

“Meg, wait,” Cara said as she watched Meg scurry toward the door. “Don’t leave like this!”

Meg closed the door behind her, climbed into her car, and headed home. When she got there she curled into a ball on the couch and waited for Steve to come home from work. Her phone rang two different times, but she never got up to answer it. Over the next few weeks she received multiple calls and at least a dozen e-mails from Cara, but she didn’t answer any of them. What was there for her to say? She was jealous, and angry, and hurt, and depressed, and felt like she’d been betrayed. There were no words left. After a while the calls stopped coming, and they both understood that the friendship was over.

Slowly, Meg got used to having lost her dream of having children, her best friend, and eventually her husband. She was learning to live this new life alone with her walks on the beach and her bread making and trying really hard to be okay with everything that she had lost along the way.

And then Cara had the nerve to selfishly show up on Meg’s doorstep without ever wondering if Meg had any interest in seeing her.

“Cara, wait!” Jane yelled, but Cara ignored her. “Meg, please. We didn’t come here to fight.”

“Then you shouldn’t have come,” Meg whispered, all the emotions she’d felt at that kitchen table years ago flooding her again.

“I’m sorry I was an *. I know I was. I know I owe you an explanation, and I will give it to you, but can’t we just come in? I need you guys right now. Please. Let’s just talk about whatever happened between you two. I think it’s time all of us sit down and figure this out. It’s been too long, and we’ll never get the time back. Let’s not make this worse than it already is. Please, Meg. Say something. We just drove over two hours to get here.”

Beep. The oven sounded. Finally, her bread was ready.





fourteen


Cara stifled tears as she sat behind the wheel of her car. She knew she shouldn’t have come here. She knew that she should’ve just told Jane to figure out her problems on her own. By trying to help her, Cara would be opening up the old wounds that she’d let heal years ago. But how was she supposed to let Jane go through all of this alone, especially when she was looking for a way out herself? She’d stupidly believed that maybe this was her chance to fix the friendship that she’d so desperately missed. She should’ve known that things couldn’t be that easy.

Cara was surprised at how different Meg looked, how much she’d changed over the past three years. She had the same hair, a short blond bob with a piece tucked behind her right ear, and the same sprinkling of freckles across the bridge of her nose. She had the same pale skin and the same blue eyes, but she looked nothing like her former self. Her eyes seemed vacant, her skin was sallow, her energy was gone. She looked like she’d aged ten years over the course of three. Most people probably wouldn’t notice the subtle way her shoulders slumped forward, or the few extra pounds she was carrying on her hips, or the dark hollows under her eyes—but to Cara, she looked as worn as the faded green cardigan hanging loosely off her body. She wasn’t over anything. If anything, time had only made things worse.

Deciding to end her pregnancy hadn’t been easy, especially since she’d been thirty-four, and well aware that time was no longer on her side. One morning she was in the shower getting ready to show a four-bedroom Tudor on the other side of town when nausea overwhelmed her. After the appointment, she stopped at the drugstore and bought a test, but she knew she was pregnant before she ever peed on the stick. She had stopped taking her birth control because it seemed unnecessary. Her husband hadn’t touched her in months, and she thought pumping herself full of hormones was stupid. Meg had gone through hell trying to get pregnant, and all Cara ever heard women talking about was the innumerable problems they were having trying to conceive. What were the odds that one night, after her husband had had too much whiskey with his buddies, he would get lost in the hallway and wander into her room when he got home, and that she would actually let him stay? What were the odds that one night was all it would take?

Reed had become particularly insufferable at that point in their marriage. One morning he woke her up by throwing a pair of gym shorts at her head.

April 2010

“Get up. It’s six A.M.—I’ve already run five miles and you’re still in bed like some lazy housewife.”

“What?” she asked, still pulling herself out of a deep sleep. It was still dark outside—she was hardly oversleeping, and even if she had been, why should he care? If she spent more time in bed lately it was because it was the only place in the house she could count on him leaving her alone.