“I don’t know why this is happening,” she whimpered. “What did I do? What did I ever do?”
“Nothing,” he assured her.
“He’s gone, and he isn’t coming back, and I’m so… so…” She looked up at him, feeling the grief and the anger etching themselves into her face. “It isn’t fair. It isn’t fair that it’s me and not someone else, and it isn’t fair that it should be anyone, and it isn’t fair that I lost the-” And then she choked, and the gasps became sobs, and all she could do was cry.
“Francesca,” Michael said, kneeling at her feet. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
“I know,” she sobbed, “but it doesn’t make it better.”
“No,” he murmured.
“And it doesn’t make it fair.”
“No,” he said again.
“And it doesn’t-It doesn’t-”
He didn’t try to finish the sentence for her. She wished he had; for years she wished he had, because maybe then he would have said the wrong thing, and maybe then she wouldn’t have leaned into him, and maybe then she wouldn’t have allowed him to hold her.
But oh, God, how she missed being held.
“Why did you go?” she cried. “Why can’t you help me?”
“I want to-You don’t-” And then finally he just said, “I don’t know what to say.”
She was asking too much of him. She knew it, but she didn’t care. She was just so sick of being alone.
But right then, at least for a moment, she wasn’t alone. Michael was there, and he was holding her, and she felt warm and safe for the first time in weeks. And she just cried. She cried weeks of tears. She cried for John and she cried for the baby she’d never know.
But most of all she cried for herself.
“Michael,” she said, once she’d recovered enough to speak. Her voice was still shaky, but she managed his name, and she knew she was going to have to manage more.
“Yes?”
“We can’t go on like this.”
She felt something change in him. His embrace tightened, or maybe it loosened, but something was not quite the same. “Like what?” he asked, his voice hoarse and hesitant.
She drew back so she could see him, relieved when his arms fell away, and she didn’t have to wriggle free. “Like this,” she said, even though she knew he didn’t understand. Or if he did, that he was going to pretend otherwise. “With you ignoring me,” she continued.
“Francesca, I-”
“The baby was to have been yours in a way, too,” she blurted out.
He went pale, deathly pale. So much so that for a moment she couldn’t breathe.
“What do you mean?” he whispered.
“It would have needed a father,” she said, shrugging helplessly. “I-You-It would have had to be you.”
“You have brothers,” he choked out.
“They didn’t know John. Not the way you did.”
He moved away, stood, and then, as if that weren’t enough, backed up as far as he could, all the way to the window. His eyes flared slightly, and for a moment she could have sworn that he resembled a trapped animal, cornered and terrified, waiting for the finality of the kill.
“Why are you telling me this?” he said, his voice flat and low.
“I don’t know,” she said, swallowing uncomfortably. But she did know. She wanted him to grieve as she grieved. She wanted him to hurt in every way she hurt. It wasn’t fair, and it wasn’t nice, but she couldn’t help it and she didn’t feel like apologizing for it, either.
“Francesca,” he said, and his tone was strange, hollow and sharp, and like nothing she’d ever heard.
She looked at him, but she moved her head slowly, scared by what she might see in his face.
“I’m not John,” he said.
“I know that.”
“I’m not John,” he said again, louder, and she wondered if he’d even heard her.
“I know.”
His eyes narrowed and focused on her with dangerous intensity. “It wasn’t my baby, and I can’t be what you need.”
And inside of her, something started to die. “Michael, I-”
“I won’t take his place,” he said, and he wasn’t shouting, but it sounded like maybe he wanted to.
“No, you couldn’t. You-”
And then, in a startling flash of motion, he was at her side, and he’d grabbed her shoulders and hauled her to her feet. “I won’t do it,” he yelled, and he was shaking her, and then holding her still, and then shaking her again. “I can’t be him. I won’t be him.”
She couldn’t speak, couldn’t form words, didn’t know what to do.
Didn’t know who he was.
He stopped shaking her, but his fingers bit into her shoulders as he stared down at her, his quicksilver eyes afire with something terrifying and sad. “You can’t ask this of me,” he gasped. “I can’t do it.”
“Michael?” she whispered, hearing something awful in her voice. Fear. “Michael, please let me go.”
He didn’t, but she wasn’t even sure he’d heard her. His eyes were lost, and he seemed beyond her, unreachable.
“Michael!” she said again, and her voice was louder, panicked.
And then, abruptly, he did as she asked, and he stumbled back, his face a portrait of self-loathing. “I’m sorry,” he whispered, staring at his hands as if they were foreign bodies. “I’m so sorry.”