Once More With Feeling by Megan Crane Page A

my position as Tim’s wife … for what? To what end? So I could deliver the remains of my marriage into Carolyn’s hands the moment Tim woke up? What was my plan, exactly?
    The baby thing killed me. It actually … ached. It hurt in ways that surprised me anew with each harsh breath. Because you don’t know how much you want things until they’re taken from you, do you? Until someone else takes them from you.
    Tim and I had had a plan. We had always had plans. We’d made up a checklist for our life together and we’d taken great pleasure in ticking things off, one by one. Our own house –
check
. Our own practice –
check
. We’d planned to start trying for a baby in the next year or so, now that the practice was on its feet and doing well. It was the next chapter in our beautiful life, the one we’d plotted out together all those years ago in New York. I’d thought we were still on the same page. I’d thought we still wanted the same things.
    I’d wanted his babies, if only in the abstract, and now I understood that would never happen. Not the way we’d planned it. Carolyn hadn’t just stolen my man. She’d stolen my future children, too.
    It was one thing to try to accept that he’d had the affair. Another to try to get past the fact that he’d had it with Carolyn, of all people. I thought I’d been doing a fairly good job with that – though Lianne had claimed only yesterday on the phone that I was in denial. But I’d been prepared to take him back when the infatuation passed. I’d been more than prepared. Then, that long first night here in the hospital, I’d assumed that the accident would serve as a wake-up call to him, as these things often did, according to myth and legend. I’d assumed that it would wrench him –
us
– back from this particular cliff.
    But all the things I’d thought were based on the assumption that once he came back, everything would be as itwas. That we could just … erase these past months. Pretend they’d never happened. Carry on as before.
    A baby made that impossible, now and forever. Even if he and Carolyn were over. Even if he came back to me. There would always be
that child
. The physical manifestation of everything he’d thrown away, everything he’d done.
    That poor kid
, a voice inside me whispered.
    And I had no idea what to do with that. What it meant. I only knew that I was cold straight down into my bones, in ways that had nothing to do with the December weather, and there was no hope, now, that I was ever going to thaw.
    The waiting room was, happily, empty when I returned.
    I took the opportunity to claim the most comfortable seat on the small sofa near the anaemic-looking potted plant in the corner. I had just settled into it and was trying to rub heat back into my hands when Carolyn walked in.
    Alone.
    It occurred to me that this was the first time we’d been alone since That Day.
    I didn’t have any idea how I should feel about that, and from the looks of it neither did Carolyn.
    ‘Oh,’ she said. She blinked as if seeing me threw her for a loop. Did she think I’d finally given up and gone home? Who knew what stories she told herself? I was sure they were epic. ‘Dad just left. We didn’t know where you were.’
    I fingered the edge of my book’s paperback cover, feelingit thicken and round slightly. I looked back at her, but I didn’t respond. She settled herself gingerly in one of the ubiquitous blue chairs, and I tried not to let myself concentrate on what seemed like such a deliberate attempt on her part to appear fragile. Maybe early pregnancy did that to you. I wouldn’t know. And, thanks to her, probably never would. She was growing a brand-new life inside of her while my life had hit a wall …
    I ordered myself to ease my death grip on my book, before I hurt myself. Or mangled the book itself into pulp.
    ‘I really appreciate what you’re doing,’ she said in a low, deliberate voice. ‘You’re making this all go