Chapter 5

Chapter 5

LINA

I stared at the words written on his tombstone.

*Daniel Cruz Torres. He loved without reservation.*

"Hi, Dad," I said, and my voice came out small and very timid The way it used to when I was a teenager sitting in exactly this spot, after the accident, after the Whitmore had taken me in and the world had become a place I no longer recognized because my guardians who had shielded me from the terrible parts of the world had died and left me afloat. 

I used to come here and talk to them both for hours in those early days, filling them in on everything as though they'd simply been away on a long trip and needed catching up.

I hadn't spoken out loud to them in a while. Usually I just sat, which felt like enough because with them I felt a lot less alone.

Today I needed more than enough.

"I'm pregnant," I said.

The wind moved through the oak tree behind me. That was all.

"I found out three days ago. I've been walking around with it ever since, and I haven't told anyone, and I think if I don't say it out loud to someone soon I'm going to come apart at the seams." I pressed my palm harder against my father's stone. "So I'm telling you."

I stayed quiet for a moment, giving them the chance to respond the way they never could.

"I don't know what I'm doing," I admitted. "I know what I should do. I've known for three days. I need to leave. I know that. Every sensible part of me knows that staying in that house, staying in that marriage, is not a life for me and it's certainly not a life for this baby." My hand moved to my stomach. 

"But then he said wait for me and I wanted to wait, Mum. I wanted to stay and see if the man who was almost apologizing to me back there was actually real."

I pressed the back of my hand against my mouth for a moment.

"He's not going to change. I know that. I've known that for two years, and I know it now, and I still wanted to believe him." I let out a slow breath. 

"He forgot about you guys. He'd actually forgotten that you were here. The two people who died pulling him out of wreckage making sure that he managed to live and keep thriving, and he'd forgotten they were buried in this cemetery. He accused me of following him and he didn't even make the connection between you guys and his reason for living. That's how much space I take up in his life. That's how much he thinks about any of this."

The morning light shifted through the trees, throwing a long stripe of gold across the path.

"I can't raise a child in that house," I said. "I can't bring a baby into a marriage where their father already considers me a burden and hasn't even been told they exist yet, but already sneered at, because they came from me. I can't watch my child grow up wondering why their father looks through them the way he looks through me." My throat tightened painfully. "I won't do it."

But.

But he had said *wait for me.*

But the color had drained from his face and the apology had been real, even as short it was, and he had looked worried during that moment when he realized what he had done, this was a new predicament, he had never done something like that, which made me think it was a fluke.

But he had looked at me over Adora's head with that unfinished sentence in his eyes and I couldn't stop thinking about what the end of it might have been. What he might have said to me.

"I'm going to leave," I told them. "I've decided. Not today, maybe, but soon. I need to find somewhere to go first, somewhere safe, and I need to think about what I'm going to say to his grandmother because she deserves a real conversation and not just a note, and I need to be able to afford to keep this baby and I can't at the moment because I have no money that is in my name and no income I can count on." I exhaled slowly.

 "But I'm going. For this baby. For myself."

I sat with them a while longer, not talking, just breathing. And letting the air cool my face and dry my tears, and I felt not alone, and it was almost as if they were seated beside me, comforting me the only way they knew how.

Eventually I stood up. I brushed the grass from my clothes and touched both headstones one more time, my knuckles grazing the carved letters of their names.

"I love you both," I said. "I'm sorry I don't come as often as I used to. I'll try to do better."

I walked back through the cemetery the way I had come, past the old oak tree, past the rows of stones in varying states of weathering. Near the gate, I passed the headstone Damien had shown me. Lyra Scott. Twenty-six years old, according to the dates. A whole life that had ended too soon. A person who had dreams and aspirations just like I did, but we both got to the same end of the road, even if I was still living.

I paused for a moment.

Whatever I thought of Adora, whatever my feelings were about her existence in my marriage and what she represented to Damien, a woman had lost her friend. That was real and it was sad and it had nothing to do with me or my personal thoughts against Adora and if she deserved to lose her friend.

"I'm sorry," I said quietly, to Lyra Scott's headstone, meaning it this time. It was the least I could say to her.

Then I walked through the gate and got into my car.