Traffic isn’t bad as I make my way across town and my mind wanders to everything I learned today about having a baby and tears sting my eyes again but I force them back. I am not going to start crying again. I refuse. Shaking my head, I run through the figures Eden had written down and sigh. When I checked my bank account this afternoon, I had four hundred dollars in checking and twelve hundred in savings - not even half of what it would run me to try a cycle of IUI. It would take me, at least, six months to save up enough for the first round and there is still an eighty percent chance it wouldn’t even work and I don’t even want to think about how long I’d have to save for the IVF. Maybe, I just have to accept the fact that when I left Wyatt, I was walking away from more than just my husband.
I pull into the parking lot of the building where the support group is held and park in the front before staring up at the building. My chest aches and every cell in my body wants desperately to turn around and just go home. I can’t do this today - not when it feels like my entire body is a giant open wound and I have to walk through a salt mine - but maybe it will be better tomorrow. Or not. Who fucking knows anyway? Dr. Brewer always tells me that things will get easier with time and yeah, most days, I am okay but days like today when the magnitude of mistakes comes crashing down on me and the pain is so intense that I feel like I can’t breathe, it sure as hell doesn’t feel like it’s getting any better.
“Piper!” a voice calls and I take a deep breath as I turn to look at my friend, Lillian, forcing a smile to my face. Her face falls as she studies mine. “What’s wrong?”
“I can’t go in there today.”
“What happened?”
I shake my head because I do not want to talk about it but I already know that this is not going to slide with Lillian. We met at one of the worst times in my life and she has always had my back. Between her and Eden, I built myself a little family to lean on during the bad days and I am always so grateful for their presence in my life.
“You know what? I’m fucking starving. You wanna go grab some food?” she asks and I nod as relief rushes through me.
“I could eat.”
Grinning, she rounds the back of the car and slides into the passenger seat before buckling her seat belt. I back out of the parking space and glance back at the building to see Dr. Brewer frowning at me, her arms crossed over her chest, and her glasses slipping down her nose. She is going to chew me out when I go in for my next appointment but this feels right. I’m not in the right head space to go share all this fresh pain with the group but talking to one of my best friends about it is still better than hiding under the covers and wishing the rest of the world would go away.
“So, where are we going?”
I smile as I pull out onto the street. “I’m feeling nostalgic. How does Sunrise Diner sound?”
“Perfect. We haven’t been back there since…”
“I know,” I say, cutting her off with a nod. With the state I’m in, I’d rather not think about the last time I was at Sunrise Diner and instead focus on the security I always felt there.
“So… we gonna talk about what’s bugging you so much today?”
Sighing, I nod. “Eden suggested that I look into having a baby on my own last week and today, she brought over a bunch of information about my options.”
“Oh. It didn’t go well.”
“It did not,” I confirm, shaking my head. “Everything is so expensive that I would have to save for years and by then, who knows if I could even get pregnant.”
“Aw, babe. I’m so sorry. I know this isn’t any sort of consolation but you’ll always have me, no matter what happens.”
I smile as I glance over at her. “You know, that’s exactly what Eden said.”
“You know why?” she asks, her lips stretching into a smile that I know all too well and I laugh as I shake my head.
“Oh, no. Don’t you dare do it.”
She pats out a little beat on her thighs. “‘Cause we’re the three best friends that anybody could have… Come on, Pippy. Sing it with me.”
“Hell, no,” I say, giggling as she pats her legs harder and continues singing.
“We’re the three best friends that anyone could have. Wolfpack howl, Piper! Do it with me!”
She throws her head back and lets out a howl. Laughing, I tip my head back as I copy her, most of my stress melting away as we pull into the parking lot of the Sunrise Diner. As I park the car, I turn to her and smile.
“Thanks, Lil. This is exactly what I needed.”
She smiles. “Anytime, girl. You know that.”
Chapter Five
Wyatt
“She’s fucking haunting me,” I whisper to myself, staring down at the divorce papers on top of my desk as they taunt me with their presence. Last I checked, those papers were stuffed into the bottom drawer of my desk so I wouldn’t have to look at them or think about them and yet, here they are, tormenting me and I can’t force myself to look away as an all too familiar pain pierces my chest and a memory from the day these showed up in the mail assaults me. I hadn’t heard from Piper in six years and I thought I was moving on with my life when a scrawny kid knocked on my door and told me I was served. The rest of that week is a blur because I don’t think I stopped drinking long enough to even begin to sober up until Storm came over and told me to get my shit together. I threw the papers in the desk and told myself I would deal with them later but later never came.
Staring at her signature at the bottom of the page, I blow out a breath and shake my head. How? Even after all these years, I don’t understand how could she take everything we had, everything we were starting to build together and just throw it all away on some fucking guy. I sink into the chair and lean my head back, running my hand over my face before I unlock my phone and pull up the email she sent me during that deployment that shook my world and ruined everything.
Wyatt,
This isn’t working for me anymore and I met someone new.
Take care of yourself.
Piper
I barely resist the urge to chuck my phone across the room and toss it onto the desk instead. Why the fuck do I even still have it? When I first got that email, I thought it was a joke and sent her an email back telling her she wasn’t funny but the next day, there was no reply and the day after that, still nothing. I lost my shit and three other guys had to drag me back to my rack where I spent the night imagining all sorts of scenarios where my wife had been kidnapped or something. The next day, I called my dad and asked him to go check in on her. He drove all night and when he got to our house in North Carolina, he found it empty and all her stuff gone. Truthfully, I still didn’t believe it. I knew there had to be some kind of explanation but when I came home from deployment six months later and walked into that house, it hit me like a ton of fucking bricks. At first glance, it looked almost exactly like I left it but when I started going through things and noticed her clothes missing along with the few mementos that were most important to her, it really drove home the fact that she was gone. The thing that really took it over the top for me, though, was her wedding ring sitting on the kitchen table with a note that just said, “I’m sorry.”