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WHEN ALEX CAME INTO the room, there was a moment when all we did was look at each other before he came to my side and kissed me.
He also had taken a shower and changed into a fresh pair of clothes. He’d kept his beard, which I thought suited him, and he was wearing a new pair of dark jeans, a white button-front shirt, and a pair of black shoes with bright silver buckles that hung low on the outer sides.
Blackwell, I thought. She didn’t just take care of herself and me. She also took care of everyone else. I looked at Alex, saw the sorrow in his eyes and the devastation on his face, and I could feel him searching for words that wouldn’t come.
And now I need to be strong for both of us.
“You look handsome,” I said in an effort to open the conversation on a light note.
He sat down next to me, and seemed caught off guard by the comment. “I do?”
“You do.”
“Blackwell,” he said as he reached for my hand and started to run his thumb gently over my fingers. “She had new clothes delivered for all of us. She insisted that we take showers.”
“After nearly two weeks on that island, can you blame her?”
“Not really.”
“I like the beard," I said.
“I didn’t have anything to shave it off.”
“Maybe you won’t.”
“I thought you liked the stubble?”
“I like this, too.”
He lifted my hand and kissed the back of it.
“Are you comfortable?” he asked.
“Whatever they’ve given me must be localized because I can’t feel any pain where they operated, and yet I’m fully awake. I’m not groggy at all.”
“Is there anything I can get for you?”
“You're enough.”
“I wish that were true. I wasn’t enough for you outside of that bank, I know that much. You put your life on the line for me again.”
“It's not as if you didn’t do the same for us when you went away with those men, Alex. You knew the risks you were taking. So did I when I went after that son of a bitch, Wes. I have no regrets. I’d do it again.”
“That’s what concerns me.”
“Don’t let it concern you.”
“But it does, and it should. There was a moment when I thought I was going to lose you,” he said quietly. “The idea of it tore me apart. Do you remember what you said to me before you passed out?”
“I remember what I said—and I meant it. I still do.”
“No one could replace you.”
“And now no one has to.”
“But what you said—”
“—was said out of love. If I had died, I would have wanted you to find someone else. I don’t regret saying that because I’ll always want you to be happy, Alex. I would have wanted you to eventually find love, and to have the baby that I have failed to give you—”
“That’s enough,” he said.
“You didn’t let me finish. The baby I failed to give you at this point. We will have children. I have to believe that we will.”
“Do you want to talk about any of this?”
“About the baby?”
“Yes. But only if you’re ready to. We don't have to do it now. I don’t want to upset you if you’re not ready.”
If I hadn’t talked with Blackwell earlier, I might not have been ready to talk about our loss this soon because the pain was too deep. But now, thanks to the perspective she had offered, I felt that I could handle the conversation, as difficult as it would be for each of us to have. The sooner we discussed it, the sooner the healing could begin. “I think we probably should talk, though I’m not sure how much there is to say because there’s no taking back what happened. I lost our child. Apparently, it happened soon after the crash.”
“You need to know that you did nothing wrong.”
“Blackwell said the same thing.”
“Do you agree?”
“The doctor said that there wasn’t a trace of HCG in my system, which says to me that the miscarriage was caused by the crash. I know that what happened was out of my hands, but that doesn’t make it any easier for me to accept. Do I want to cry right now? Yes, I do. Am I aching inside? I’m barely holding it together. But for the sake of our marriage, I’m going to have to accept that there’s nothing I could have done to protect our baby. The crash was too much for it. That’s where the blame needs to go. Otherwise, if I don’t accept that, I don't see how I’m going to come through this. And if I don’t come through this, it will only harm both of us in the end.”
“Jennifer—”
“You know it’s true,” I said. “No matter how strong our marriage is, it can only sustain so much, Alex. That’s true for anyone. We’re both heartbroken. We’re going to have to support each other through this for the rest of our lives. It won’t be easy—how could it ever be easy? But at the very least—and after all we’ve been through together—we still have each other, and that alone will help us deal with the pain even during those moments when it seems as if the pain might become too much.”
My eyes brightened with tears when I said that, and I could hear my voice start to break when I spoke again. “I’ve never felt such a loss,” I said. “I’ve never felt so empty before. But we have to be strong. We need to mourn the death of our child, and when my gynecologist tells me that we can try for another, I don’t want to wait, because I do want to have your child.”
“I want the same thing.”
“Then we’ll have it,” I said with resolve. “I have no doubt. Now, listen to me,” I said, pulling myself together the best I could. “Blackwell told me that there is a better chance that Cutter will pull through.”
“I believe that he will.”
“Then that leaves us with only one other thing to worry about,” I said.
At first, he tilted his head at me as if he didn’t understand, but then he caught the steely look in my eyes, and the undercurrent of what I was thinking became clear to him. I could tell by the way his lips parted that he saw what I saw—that we could channel our collective rage at the loss of our child toward something that needed our help before it was too late.
If it wasn’t already too late.
One child was lost to us, but what about our other child? What about Wenn? Didn’t we also have a responsibility to fight for that?
In silence, Alex and I looked at each other for a long, tenuous moment in which all I could hear was myself breathing, Alex breathing, and the monitors beeping beside me in a faster clip as my heartbeat rose.
And then I felt my heart harden—and my soul darken—as my protective instincts kicked in.
“Who is running Wenn now?” I asked.
“I don’t know. My focus has been on you. Frankly, until I knew you were well, I didn’t give a damn. I haven’t checked.”
“Then I need you to give a damn now. Wenn is your other child. We need to fight for it. We can’t lose them both.”
“Wenn is not my child. It was my father’s child. I just inherited it. Wenn is a thing.”
“So, we’re just going to abandon it?”
“What are you saying?”
“That we’re not going to lose this battle. And I’m afraid that we’re in for one. I might be wrong, but we went missing for two weeks, which is enough time for anything to have happened at Wenn. I need you to find out who’s running Wenn now. Find out if it’s that son of a bitch Stephen Rowe. Find out if he’s running the ship, or if somebody else is. And at what capacity. If we need to go to war, then we need every bit of information we can get in order to develop a plan.”
“Jennifer, I can take care of Wenn on my own. You need to get well.”
I reached for his hand and gripped it in my own. “Don’t you see? I also need an outlet. I need to fight for something. So, please just hear me out. Because of everything we’ve been through, everything we’ve lost, I’m ready to go to hell and back for something else that matters to me. Something that I hope hasn’t already been stolen from us. Something I might be able to help save. I might just need to win a war to get through the worst of what I’m feeling right now, Alex. And right now? Right now, that war begins with Wenn. Wenn is worth it. If each of us needs to get in the dirt and fight for it, then that’s what we’ll do. So, go. Make whatever phone calls you need to make. Find out whatever it is you need to know. And then?” When I met his eyes with my own, I could tell that he was shocked—and perhaps a little taken aback—by the coldness of my passion. “Then we’re going to crush anyone who’s ever thought they could take that child away from us.”