I was driving her home before she delivered the final blow, her whisper ragged with grief.

“It was a boy.”

I pulled the car over, my shoulders shaking. Her hand touched my arm, and I turned to her, sobbing into her neck.

“Jared Jeremiah Vega,” she said, her voice devastated.

Broken.

“Jeremiah for Jerry?” I finally found the strength to ask.

I felt her nodding against my cheek.

“It was the perfect name, Danika.”

She’d been crying silently, but now she began to sob. It came out of her in a great, heaving flood.

“This is all my fault,” she told me. “I fell down in the shower that morning, then just went on with my day, thinking everything would be fine. I should have gone straight to the hospital. Then none of this would have happened. We’d still be having our baby boy.”

I couldn’t stand it, couldn’t take that she was blaming herself for an accident. “No, no, no,” I whispered tenderly into her hair. “It’s not your fault. Don’t ever say that. I can’t bear it. It’s my fault. I should have been there.”

She protested, telling me it wasn’t, and I didn’t know if it was her tone or my conscience, but I didn’t believe her.

Tragedy never took its full chunk out of you right away. It always took a while to hit you head on, and sink in and for something substantial, some hint of the real feeling, the real reaction, to come to the surface, and this loss was not done taking its toll on us.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

DANIKA

After that, it was a slow motion free fall for us.

A quiet, helpless unraveling.

Some days I raged against it with every fiber of my being, but others…others I was as far gone as Tristan, and I didn’t even need to be drunk to get there.

So much had been torn apart with the miscarriage, so many little pieces of us that needed to be sewn back together. Only, there was hardly any thread left. Barely enough for one of us, and certainly not enough for both.

He was gone nearly all the time after that, it seemed. I had no one to comfort me, no one to share in the pain.

I never told Bev or Jerry what had happened. As far as they knew, I’d simply spent a few days at Tristan’s apartment. Nothing out of the ordinary.

I couldn’t make myself talk about it, and though Bev’s keen eyes told me that she knew that something was wrong, I never admitted it out loud.

I visited his apartment for one of his rare visits to town. He was supposed to be expecting me, but it was obvious that he wasn’t prepared when I walked into his bedroom.

I found him alone, lying back against his headboard. I could tell that he was wasted at a glance. With what, I couldn’t say, and didn’t ask.

The what of it didn’t matter.

What mattered was the cause. And the fact that he didn’t hide it from me, when he’d always put some filter on it before, for my sake.

I could tell that he’d just given up.

I didn’t blink. I didn’t look away from his bloodshot eyes, or his shaky hands as he lit a smoke, trying and failing to meet my eyes.

I took it all in, the brutal reality of it, my face wet with tears, my jaw trembling nearly as hard as my voice when I spoke. “What can I do? Tell me, and I’ll do it. Tell me how to help you.”

To save you, I thought.

He didn’t flinch. His sensitivity, his feelings for me, had just deteriorated that much, or he was just that high. It could have been either, or both. There was nothing in his voice when he spoke. Nothing at all, not even an echo of the things he should have been feeling in response to my pain. “You can’t. I can’t.”

“Well, someone has to. Can’t you see what you’re doing to yourself? Can’t you see what it’s doing to me? Don’t you care that it’s tearing me apart?”

“What do you want from me?” His voice, at least, was animated now.

“Everything!” I shouted, enraged, heartbroken. “Everything you promised, and everything I need. What I’m willing to give to you is what I want from you. Can’t you do that for me, Tristan? Isn’t there enough of you left?”

He just shook his head, his eyes drifting closed. I’d been as good as arguing with the bed.

He’d remember none of this in the morning.

But I remembered.

I remembered everything. I had no drugs to numb me, to make me forget. I couldn’t take that path.

I wouldn’t make it back.

And neither, perhaps, would Tristan.

I began to notice a gradual change in myself, as well. I was becoming less of myself, or rather, a different version of myself. I became less Danika, the strong young woman who worked hard to build a good future, and became more Dani, the waif of a girl I’d been when I was a kid, who could never get enough love, because she had never gotten any love at all.

I fell back into old patterns from my childhood, the patterns of an enabler.

Tristan was not my mother. Our relationship was, of course, dissimilar in nature, and he was a much more loving charge to me than my mother had ever been. But I was becoming who I’d been when I’d been in my mother’s care, or arguably, she mine. The first time this occurred to me, it made me so sick that I had to run to the bathroom and lose my dinner.

No, I thought. Please, no. I love him. He loves me. We can be good for each other. He just needs more time.

This sad little phrase became a mantra in my mind. I lived for what if and if only, and I became who I thought Tristan needed me to be, rather than so much as considering what I might need for myself. That was the debilitating power that he held over me, that I’d given him along with my heart.

I’d heard about depression, had suffered from different forms of it in my abused youth, but a crippling one overtook me after that.

The most despondent low that followed the most soaring high.

For the first time in my life, I began to fantasize about dying. Not ending my own life, necessarily, but about the peace of it, the tranquility.

It was a dark time for me. The blackest phase I’d ever experienced. My thoughts constantly took morbid, twisted turns.

I would look at ceiling fans, and see myself hanging from them. Every intersection while I drove to school was a potential end to all of my pain. A leftover handful of painkillers served a new purpose in my mind, suddenly.

I would fantasize about how life would go on without me, obsessively so. Perhaps my death would be the wake-up call he needed to get his act together. Perhaps he would miss me so much, he’d follow me to some better place, where the weight of life’s sorrows held less of a hold on our every waking thought. Jared would be there, and our barely formed child would have shape and life, and we could hold him and touch him, and call him by name, and things would be better.

Unfortunately, it took another tragedy to bring me out of that dark depression.

As though my own morbid thoughts had substance, the next blow seemed to come from my very own nightmares. What I had fixated on, Leticia had embraced.

To say Leticia hadn’t taken news of the miscarriage well was a gross understatement. In fact, she’d asked me not to come see her any more. I wasn’t even hurt by that. I was worried, a bit, because I knew she needed comfort, and was refusing it, but I had so little comfort to give anymore.

I left her in peace without a fight.

In hindsight, I should have fought, but I’ll never know if that would have changed anything.

We all make our own choices, and Leticia’s was impulsive and permanent.

Tristan was making a rare visit to my house, and at first my heart soared, thinking that he was finally ready to start getting better, and he was coming to me to help him.

One glance at his face when I opened the front door told me I was dead wrong.

I led him to my room without a word, sitting on the edge of my bed beside him. He clutched my hand, looking down at his lap, and I threw my other arm over his shoulders, rubbing soothingly.

I let the silence keep us company, never knowing what to say to him anymore. The miscarriage had taken so much of the fight out of him, and he’d already been through too many rounds before that, so there hadn’t been much fight left.

Finally, after an eternity, as I stroked his back, and rubbed his shoulders, and he shuddered under my hands, he began to speak.

I could barely make the words out at first. They were given to me in quiet mumbles, in gasping sobs.

“Oh no,” I whispered, as I began to piece it together.

I turned to him then, pulling him into my body, laying back and forcing him to lie on top of me. He didn’t put up a fight, all the while whispering about his mother, his poor mother, all alone when she’d ended her life at the bottom of a bottle of sleeping pills.

I comforted him. That was my job. But my initial reaction, my first gut-deep response was pure rage. How dare she? How could she be so selfish? How could she do this to my poor, dear Tristan?

It was such a permanent solution to her problems.

It was hard to fathom, hard to process.

Leticia had been a conflicted woman. And that about summed up my feelings for her.

I loved her, and inside of real love, there was always room for forgiveness.

The way she’d treated Tristan had infuriated me, but I’d still felt for her. Always, even now.

In the end, that initial response was the most fleeting of things. More than anything else, I pitied her. We all had a breaking point, and life had landed too many solid blows for her to survive, too many tragedies for her poor mind to handle.

When I spoke at her funeral, it felt like the past repeating itself, though Tristan and I were the only attendees for this one.

Suicides were a touchy thing.

“I know she wasn’t perfect. I know well how flawed she was, but she was a loving woman. She loved with her whole heart, and when that whole heart was broken, she left us.”

I spoke directly to Tristan. “She loved you. I know she did. She was blinded by her grief, but I know that, in her lucid moments, she adored you, and felt pride that you were her son.

“I’m no authority on the universe. I know little about God, or the stars, or the afterlife, but I do know this: somewhere her soul still survives, watching over you. Somewhere they all survive. Jared, our son, your mother.

“My relationship with Leticia was brief but powerful. I felt like she loved me, no, I know she did, and it meant a lot to me. No matter how selfish it was, her death shouldn’t have more meaning than her life, so let’s remember her for the way that she loved, not the way that she died.”

Tristan met my stare and nodded, his eyes shiny, his jaw trembling. He was suffering, but I’d said the right thing. I was gratified, that even in the black cloud his mind had become, I could bring him some little bit of relief.

As terrible as the tragedy of Leticia had been, it served a desperate purpose for me, at least.

It was as though the fog had been lifted from my brain, and I could think again. I was still hurting, my heart still aching with all of the loss, but I began to attempt to live again.

To wake, to move, to try taking small steps in the right direction. I was alone in that path.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

DANIKA

Tristan’s decline was steady and sure after that.