Abby pulled up in front of Wyatt’s home. Her family’s home, before the bank took it all away.
It was still weird to see it a sage green, so different from the white her mom had liked. She knew that time went on, and Shelly, Wyatt’s wife, had had every right to paint her house whatever color she wanted.
It still seemed a little sacrilegious to Abby, but then again, her and Dad had basically turned everything her mom ever touched into a shrine. And maybe that wasn’t healthy either.
She looked over at the tire swing hanging from the oak tree’s branches, swaying slightly in the cold winter winds. Abby had spent so many summer days on that tire swing, stretching her legs up to the sky, just sure that if she pumped her legs hard enough, she’d be able to flip all the way over the top of the branch and down the other side.
Okay. Enough stalling.
It was time to get out and talk to Wyatt. With a deep breath, she got out into the cold air, bracing herself against the wind, and hurried up to the front porch. She knocked lightly and then huddled against the door, her eyes automatically picking out the changes to her childhood home. They’d replaced the street numbers with fancier, more expensive metal numbers and the mailbox was—
The door opened. “Oh, hey,” Wyatt said, the surprise evident on his face. “Come in.”
He mumbled something about two visitors in one day, but when she said, “What?” he waved the question away.
“What’s going on? Is everything okay?” he asked, a panicked note in his voice.
It took her a moment but she finally put the pieces together of why he sounded panicked. Of course. The last time a county police officer showed up at his door, his wife and child were dead on the side of the road. Even though she was off-duty, he had no way of knowing that. She was still in her deputy uniform.
“No, everything is fine,” she said. “I came over straight from work – I’m not even on the clock right now.”
“Oh. Good.” His face relaxed into a full smile. “You want something to drink? I have water, lemonade, coffee, probably a soda or two…”
“No, no. Listen, I need to tell you something.” She drew in a breath, one that she could feel all the way to her toes. “I need to tell you…I can’t have kids.” The words were the barest of a whisper, barely audible above the sound of the central heating system pumping out warm air, but they might as well have been shouted in the middle of town square. They landed like a bomb between them, separating them forever. A chasm that could never be crossed.
“What?” he breathed, staring at her.
“When I was a kid…I fell off the merry-go-round, right onto someone’s bike. The pedals…” She made a gesture towards her stomach. “They had to do emergency surgery on me to patch everything back up, but the doctors said that the damage to my uterus was too great. I would never be able to have kids. I went to an OB-GYN about a year ago just to make sure, and they ran all sorts of tests on me. There’s just not enough room for a baby, after they took out the damaged tissue.”
She held her breath and just stared at him. It was damn awkward, bringing this up with him. It wasn’t like they were really even dating, right? They’d just kissed that one time.
But if what he was feeling on his end was anywhere close to what she was feeling on her end…she had to tell him. He had to know before this went any further. Because if her gut was right, he wouldn’t want it to go any further.
Yup, he’d shut down. His face, open and happy and welcoming, had become a brick wall of…nothingness. He shoved his hands out towards her, fists facing her. “See any blood on my knuckles?” he rasped.
Startled, she look down and stared at his knuckles. “Nooo…”
“Then you can report back to your father that I haven’t been beating anyone up lately. Now get the hell out of my house.”
She jerked her head back, her eyes spiking with hot, painful tears. She didn’t say anything. Couldn’t say anything. She spun around and felt blindly for the doorknob, yanking the door open and stumbling out into the cold winter air, burning in her lungs and she was running, stumbling, towards her cruiser, crawling inside, shoving the key into the ignition and pulling away, the tears running unchecked down her cheeks.