The Presence of Grace (Love and Loss #2)(42)
“Okay.”
I hardly waited for her response before I ended the call, then turned my back to the door and wiped under my eyes again. Devon came in the room and the air changed instantly. Suddenly, everything was tense. He came toward me, his footsteps harder and surer than they were just moments before, and his hands gripped my shoulders. It wasn’t painful, but it wasn’t soft either.
“What is it?”
“No,” I said quickly, trying to put on a brave face. “It’s nothing.”
“It’s something, Grace.”
I knew I had to look at him, to show him I was all right, to pretend as if everything was fine, if he was going to let me leave and have the breakdown I needed. So I lifted my face and put on a smile, weak as it may have been, and lied.
“Promise. Everything’s fine. Shelby just called and was upset about something. But I do have to go,” I said, breaking our gaze. I couldn’t look him in the eye any longer. “Thank you for eating with me.” I looked around, trying to seem too busy looking for my purse to pay him any attention, even though my whole body was tuned in to how tense he was, as if he were holding back and ready to snap at any moment.
We remained there for a few moments, me looking anywhere but at him, and him unmoving but breathing heavily. Finally, his hands took hold of my face with a strong but tender hold, and he dipped low to catch my gaze.
“I’ll let you walk out of here, Grace. I’ll let you leave and deal with whatever you have going on all alone, but I want to be very clear. I want to help you. I want to be with you. If you have a problem, I want to help you through it. But I do not want to chase after someone hoping to save them. Not again.” He let out a sigh, but then took another sharp, deep breath and stepped closer. “Watching you walk away would hurt, but not as much as trailing after you.”
The way his eyes bored into mine, the way his hands were holding on to me as if he didn’t want to let me go, and his words, all came together and cut me open. A minute before I’d been prepared to walk out and spend an evening alone, crying in my apartment, but I didn’t want to leave him behind. And more than that, I didn’t want him to feel left behind either. It hadn’t occurred to me that we’d both been left behind in the past. It hadn’t occurred to him that we had that in common because, up until that moment, I’d avoided every opportunity to share with him why I’d gotten divorced and moved to Florida.
So, standing in the office of his hardware store with his hands framing my face and tears streaming down my cheeks, I brought Devon along with me.
“The only thing I wanted when Jeff and I got married was a family. We tried to get pregnant on our own, naturally, but it wasn’t happening. When we sought help we were told there was something wrong with me, with my ovaries, and getting pregnant naturally was going to be an issue. I begged Jeff to try in vitro. I had to beg him because he didn’t seem interested at all, which should have been my first warning sign, I’m sure. But I finally convinced him to let me try. It was weeks and weeks of hormone therapy coupled with two failed attempts. Two separate heartbreaking months of hoping and praying to be pregnant, only to have nothing show up on the scan. It was painful and emotionally destructive.” I sucked in a breath and it came back out with a shudder. “And what I didn’t know was that while I was sacrificing my body to make us a family, grieving every time it didn’t work, Jeff was having an affair with his ex-girlfriend.” My eyes closed, heavy with the weight of my words. Maybe it was because I was too tired to keep them open anymore, or perhaps I just didn’t want to see Devon’s face when he realized that I hadn’t been woman enough to keep my husband.
“I couldn’t give him a family, and for a while between rounds I couldn’t give him my body. Apparently I wasn’t enough. But now,” I said, my voice catching on the sob lodged in my throat. “Now he’s married to her and she’s having his baby.” The sob broke free and I collapsed against him, crying for so many reasons. Crying because my ex-husband cheated on me. Crying because I would never be the mother I so desperately longed to be. And crying because I had just told the man I’d hoped I could build some sort of life with exactly what kind of desolate future he would have if he stayed with me.
“Hey,” he whispered into my hair between tender kisses against my temple. “Grace, don’t cry, baby. Shhhh….” He held me as I sobbed, which both soothed and embarrassed me. “I know it sounds trite,” he said as he slowly swayed me back and forth, trying to comfort me. “But any man who would cheat on you is an idiot.” A tiny smile crossed my face, not that he could see it. “But any man who cheats on his wife while she’s sacrificing herself to give him a child, well, he’s an *.” Devon pulled back and brushed all my crazy hair away from my face, looking me right in the eye. “And, baby, you deserve better than that.”
He was right, but he was also wrong. Jeff had done something terrible to me, I could understand that. But there was always a bigger part of my brain that held on to the idea that he wouldn’t have cheated on me if I’d been able to give him a child. When he’d married me, he expected a whole woman, but what he’d gotten was a broken one, a woman with something incredibly damaged inside her.
The most terrible part of my brain couldn’t blame him for cheating.