Page 45 of The Liar's Wife

When the doctor finally came for me, he pulled his scrub cap down in front of his chest, his expression a full apology without a word.

“She’s being taken to the ICU. She came through surgery… She’s not in the clear yet, but we believe she’s going to pull through.”

I swallowed, rubbing my palm over my face, mixing my sweat with my tears. “Thank God,” I choked out. “Is she…” I blinked. “I mean…the baby. Is the baby okay?”

The doctor’s eyes fell. “I’m so sorry. Your wife suffered extreme trauma to her abdomen in the crash. We did all we could to save them both, but we lost the baby’s heartbeat. Because of all the damage, there was no way to repair her uterus. We were forced to do a total hysterectomy.” He put a hand on my shoulder. “She’s going to need you when she wakes up. Not only did she lose a baby today, she lost the chance to ever have one again.”

I could see it in his expression…she’d never recover. Not really. Even though she’d healed physically—the bleeding stopped, her scars faded—the woman I’d married was not the woman I was living with anymore.

Over time, we grew apart. I know it’s cliché. I know you’re thinking about what a piece of shit I am right now, and believe me, I am too. But how do you help someone who doesn’t want to be helped? How can you be there for someone who shuts you out?

After a year of silence, a year of direct answers to direct questions, a year of doctor’s appointments and crying, and endless fights and blame and drinking too much and not eating enough, I couldn’t do it anymore.

In my weakest moment, I asked her for a divorce. I walked away from the girl I loved, the girl I’d loved since high school, the girl I’d thought I’d love for the rest of my life, and when I did…I felt free for the first time in so long.

I never completely allowed myself to feel my own grief because I was always deescalating hers. I never felt allowed to get mad, even when she’d left the food out all night and it spoiled, even when she’d quit her job and left everything up to me, even when she refused to see the doctors I couldn’t afford but tried to get her to see anyway.

She needed help, but I was out of options. I was out of patience, out of pain, out of grace.

Her parents checked her into a facility to deal with her depression, but she checked out almost immediately. She refused to be helped.

I’m not blaming her, okay? I know I’ll never know the way it felt to have a life taken from my body, but I lost my son that day, too. I lost the family I planned. The future I predicted. I lost everything I thought my future would hold in the blink of an eye, but I stayed. I tried to get better. Get over it. I tried to make things better for her, show her therewere other ways. We could still have a family. There were options.

She wasn’t interested.

So, believe me when I say I exhausted every avenue I believed I had. I tried. God, I tried. In the end, it wasn’t enough.Iwasn’t enough. She wanted our child back, and I could never give her that.

No one could.

I met Palmer the month after I moved from Red River to Oceanside. When I say she was not in the plan, I mean it more than I can tell you. I wanted to clear my head, figure out what I wanted for my life, figure out how to deal with all I’d dealt with over the last year. So, I left the bank. I got a job at a hardware store, just trying to make ends meet while I crashed on a buddy’s couch, and I vowed to move on with my life.

When Palmer came into the store one day, looking for wood to build her own bookshelf, I asked her out before I’d even realized it happened. I legitimately don’t even remember how it happened. Two weeks later, I finished the bookshelf she’d given up on when her Pinterest plan didn’t work out.

Three months later, three blissful months spent with someone who actually wanted me around, someone who could look me in the eye and not see all the pain my love had caused, someone whose entire history with me wasn’t torn to shreds by a drunk idiot running a red light, and I couldn’t get enough. I lapped her up like a dog to water. Breathed her in like she was oxygen I’d never had. I fell in love with her harder than I could’ve braced myself for, and when she told me she was pregnant, I proposed right away. Like, that second.

It wasn’t because of the baby, though that certainly helped. It was almost like I’d been waiting for an excuse to do it. I loved her, but I didn’t want to scare her off. She was fiercely independent, wealthy on her own, used to doing things her way. She didn’t need me, and that terrified me. I didn’t want to move things too fast and scare her away.

It wasn’t until after we announced Palmer’s pregnancy that I heard from Kat for the first time since I’d filed for the divorce. She’d been refusing to sign the papers, but once she heard about the baby, I begged her to sign. I wanted to marry Palmer. Kat wanted proof that it was mine. She was angry, hurt. I hadn’t told Palmer about my past, so I could never explain the need for a paternity test to her. I ordered a fake paternity test result online from a prank store and had it sent to her. A week later, she signed the papers. I thought it would be the last time I heard from her.

When Palmer was midway through her pregnancy, Kat contacted me again. She apologized, said she was sorry for the way she’d handled things. The way she handled everything. She told me she was healthy. That she’d been going to therapy, processing her grief. She’d started her old food blog back up, and she was getting to travel around the US to run it. She told me she was sorry for all the pain she put me through and that she knew I’d tried my best.

She told me that she loved me. That she always would.

Without me having to say it, she knew I felt the same way.

As the pregnancy neared its end, Kat would send me occasional congratulations and warm wishes. I never believed it was inappropriate. After Gray was born, she asked if she could meet him. She said that seeing me happy, seeing me moving on, me as a dad, she thought it could helpher move on as well. She said she was thinking about adopting.

I was an idiot. I remembered her for who she was, believed her when she said she was better. I met her at the park near our apartment on Palmer’s first day back to work. I never wanted to hide what I was doing—I didn’t want to sneak around—but I couldn’t bear to tell Palmer about Kat. I didn’t want her to think about me, what I still thought of myself—that I was a coward. That I ran away when things got hard. That I wasn’t worthy of love if I couldn’t stick around and make my vows mean something. I could never tell her the truth. I didn’t want her to look at me the way my family did. The way Kat’s family did.

The first time we met up, she seemed so normal. Like her old self. I was cautious with Gray, but I let her talk to him, let her play with him. It really seemed like it helped. She even brought him a sweet little onesie that was quirky and adorable, just like her. I thought things were going to be okay. Finally, this nagging worry in the back of my head could fade because it genuinely seemed like she was better.

That night, her father called me. I hadn’t heard from him since I’d left, though since then, I’d been sending him most of my paychecks—one thousand dollars a month—to help get the house paid off that Kat and I bought together. He had moved Kat home to Crestview; she was living in her parents’ rental house next door to them, but the mortgage still had to be paid until it would sell. In a small town, that could be awhile. It was costing me nearly everything I made to do it, but it was only fair. The divorce had granted it to her, but I still felt responsible. It wasn’t her fault she’d struggled to keep a job, nor her parents’ fault. They weren’t rich, and they’d always struggled to make ends meet, so taking on ourmortgage wasn’t exactly ideal for them. We all just shouldered the responsibility the best way we knew how.

When he called that night, he was furious. And I had no idea why. He asked what I was thinking seeing Kat again, that she’d been working to get better, but that seeing me caused her to spiral.

I felt like shit, okay? I mean, how was I supposed to know she’d been lying all that time. I’d gone back to following her blog, and she really did seem to be her old self again. I had no idea how far the lie had gone. Apparently she’d been telling everyone in Crestview that we were still married, that I was away for work, and her most recent lie—the reason her dad was calling me then…she was claiming we were planning to adopt a baby.

At hearing that, I should’ve never gone back. I should’ve protected my child above all else, but Kat was my first best friend. She was the person I watched grow from a mud-covered four-year-old to a beautiful bride on our wedding day. She’s the one I cried with when my sister died. The one whose hand I held when my parents announced their divorce. Growing up, we spent every waking minute together. I’d abandoned her once, I just…I couldn’t do it again.