I think if we're going to have any kind of honest conversation about any of this, we both have to be in the room. All the way in. James looked at her for a long time. Then he said, "Tell me about the miscarriage." Sophia's breath went out of her all at once.
You don't have to protect me from it. He said, "I know it happened. I know it's done. I'm asking because it was mine too and I never got to." He stopped, pressed his lips together.
I never got to acknowledge it. Tell me. So she told him. She told him about the morning she woke up in her cousin's guest room and knew immediately that something was wrong. She told him about sitting on the bathroom floor for 2 hours because she couldn't make herself stand up.
She told him about calling the clinic alone, driving herself alone, sitting in the waiting room alone, surrounded by people who were there for entirely different reasons and feeling like she was invisible, like she was walking through a world that couldn't see her. She told him about the drive back, about pulling into the parking lot of a grocery store because she needed to stop somewhere. Needed to be around ordinary life for a minute. Needed to see people buying milk and bread and doing the small continuous things that meant life was continuing whether you could feel it or not. She told him that she sat in that parking lot for 45 minutes and she thought about calling him.
She had her phone in her hand. She had his number. She still knew it by heart. Hadn't deleted it. Told herself she hadn't deleted it because she might need to call for an emergency and not because some part of me needed the option to still be there.
She told him she put the phone back in her purse and she told him this was the part where her voice went very thin and very quiet that what she had lost was not just the pregnancy. It was the last physical connection to the future she had walked away from. And she had had to grieve that alone, entirely alone. James listened to all of it. When she stopped, the room was still.
He did not say anything for almost a full minute, which was long enough that Sophia finally asked in a very small voice. James, I'm here. "I haven't. I'm processing," He said, give me a minute. She gave him a minute.
Then he said, "I'm sorry you went through that alone." Sophia went completely still. "I'm still angry," he said immediately because he needed her to know that nothing had dissolved. Nothing was resolved. The anger was still there and was not going to pretend to be otherwise.
What you did keeping that from me, I don't know how long it's going to take me to work through that. "Sophia, yeah, I genuinely don't know." But I can be angry about the choice you made and still be sorry about what it cost you. Those two things can both be true, she closed her eyes. One tear got out just one, and she caught it quickly, pressed it away with two fingers, and then she was composed again.
Okay, she said. Her voice was barely there. There's something else, James said. She opened her eyes. He looked at her with the expression of a man who has decided to say the thing he's been not saying because not saying it has run out of usefulness.