by Chloe Walsh
"I don’t want you," she screamed and shook her head. "I want her!"
"I know," I whispered brokenly. "I know, Thorn."
"I'm not brave, Noah," she screamed in a torn voice before continuing to cry hard. "I'm not strong enough to cope with this." Knotting the covers in her small fists, a piercing, agonizing cry tore from her lips. "I'm breathing and I wish I wasn't."
"Are you okay?" I whispered when I watched her clutch at her stomach. "Does it hurt?"
"Only when I breathe," she replied lifelessly before turning her face away.
****
Chapter Sixteen
Teagan
She was buried on a Wednesday – or so I was told. I was there in body, but my mind was elsewhere. My mind was trapped in that hospital room, with my brain on repeat, watching my dead baby being placed into my arms over and over again.
Her raven black hair, porcelain skin, those faintly blue-tinged lips. I visualized myself in that room every waking hour of the day.
Holding my little bird, keeping her in my arms. Having my heart stop beating so I could go into the ground with her.
So she wouldn't be alone.
My little baby, all alone in the dark, covered in dirt.
I couldn't bear it.
The thought caused my stomach to churn.
I loved her. And she died. And now, especially now, nothing felt like home. Until it happened to a person, until you lost your soul mate, you couldn’t possibly imagine the pain of it. The pain of having your heart crack into shards of glass that cut you from the inside out.
That kills you from the inside out…
Einín was buried in the graveyard adjoining St. Peter's Church in Boulder.
Noah and I sat side by side in that church, surrounded by our friends and family, and yet I had never felt so far away from him or alone as I had in that moment.
He wasn't the man I'd fallen in love with and I sure as hell wasn't the woman he'd traveled half way across the world for.
I wasn't her.
I was broken.
Empty.
Dirty
Some people brought flowers to our home to show their condolences.
Others brought food.
Many people didn’t seem to know what to say.
Others said too much.
Their food and their flowers changed nothing.
They couldn’t bring my baby back from the dead.
They couldn’t erase the guilt inside of me.
The guilt that pressed harder against the walls of my heart with every breath I took.
Nothing gave me comfort.
Noah was here. I knew it, but I didn't want him here.
I couldn't bear it.
The blame. The resentment. I couldn't deal with it.
Einín was the one thing I never knew I wanted and now didn’t know how I could live without. She was my daughter. My baby. Mine. And nothing anyone said could bring her back or ease the gaping hole in my heart that only seemed to spread wider and wider from her absence.
God, I hated the word lost.
I didn't lose her. She was taken from me. Saying something is lost gives way to the slightest flicker of hope that that something can be found again.
My daughter wasn't lost.
She was dead.
Time didn't move quickly. Grief slowed everything down. Time crawled by, allowing me plenty of moments to wallow and mourn my loss. Now, all I wanted to do was sleep. And when I was asleep, all I wanted to do was die.
My pain was fueling so much bitterness and anger. I was crippled with it. I couldn't carry the weight of my grief. The burden was too great. I felt like I was trapped inside my own personal hell, screaming out to an empty room, with pain flushing through my veins like an IV drip. A constant, steady tremor of pain and anguish.
I couldn't talk anymore.
I couldn't form the words.
My mouth didn't work properly.
I didn't work properly.
Losing my baby had left me with nothing except the pain. The bitter fucking agony of regret. I loved her. I loved her more than I loved anyone else before even though she never took a breath of this air. Even though her eyes never opened. She was gone. I loved her and she was taken away from me.
My body burned all the time. My muscles locked solid with grief and fear. I felt paralyzed, but I could still feel.
The nurses that visited kept telling me that it would get better. But I quickly realized the only thing that got better was my ability at blocking them out.
I didn’t want to hear their voices.
I only wanted to concentrate on her.
No one ever tells you about the milk.
My breasts ached for the child I lost.
Hearing other babies cry, babies that weren't mine, set me off.
It was so demoralizing.
My body hadn't caught up with the facts and the facts were my child was dead.
She wasn't here to nurse or care for.
I didn't have a warm bundle of joy to cuddle and dote over.
I didn't have anything.
My hands hung limply at my side.
My arms were empty.
I was empty.
I couldn't look at Noah. Every time I did, I saw her. Her black hair.
I saw his disappointment. His pity. I saw things in his eyes that I never wanted to see again. I saw regret. He'd chosen wrong. I wasn't good enough.
I had one job, to keep his daughter safe, and I couldn't even do that.
I wasn't a woman.
I wasn't anything at all.
Most of the time, I wanted to peel the skin from my bones. I refused any smidgen of affection he tried to give me because I didn't deserve it.
Maybe it was the grief blinding me, or my depression making me selfish, but I couldn't see a way back for us.
I knew I was in love with Noah but I couldn't change how I felt. I couldn't fix my broken parts. The parts that had been destroyed when my daughter was taken out of my body dead and lifeless.
One part of me wanted him to hold me tight and never let me go. That part of me wanted to stay in his arms for the rest of my life. To crumble and fall apart and know that he would keep me safe. That he could put me back together again. Fix my broken pieces. Love me back to life.
The other part of me screamed stay back. Leave me be. Don’t get too close…
He was hurting too. I could see it, and I so desperately wanted to comfort him, but there wasn't enough of me left inside.
Pain, darkness, and the feeling of dying repeated all day every day.
I couldn't eat and I didn't want to.
The curtains remained drawn in my room. I was paralyzed in my own depression.
Noah blamed me for her death.
I knew he did.
He never said so, but he avoided me, slept in the spare room.
I was utterly alone and all I could do was curl up in a ball on my bed and cradle my empty stomach.
I didn't dare move.
The pain was too bad.
I just laid there, waiting for death to take me like it had taken my baby.
I didn't care about life anymore. I didn't care about music or my friends. I didn’t care about anything at all.
The muscle I had once been proud of had long wasted and faded on my now skeletal frame.
Good.
I didn't do my job right.
I didn't deserve a good life.
I didn't deserve my husband and his pity.
I wanted to disappear.
****
Chapter Seventeen
Noah
When I brought Teagan home from the hospital, she went straight into our bedroom and closed the door behind her.
Several weeks had passed since then and she hadn't left the room. Christmas came and went, taking her twenty-sixth birthday along with it. As did New Years and the first half of January.
Every couple of hours or so since Teagan had taken to the bed, I would
stick my head around the door and check on her, only to find that she hadn't moved an inch.
She remained in the fetal position, facing the wall, with her long golden hair draped over her face like a curtain – keeping the world out.
I tried countless times every day to get her out of bed.
She never moved.
Every morning I ran a bath for her, she never budged. In the end, I began to wash her myself, meticulously washing and changed the dressings on her stomach while she just laid there, unmoving, unblinking, staring off into nothingness.
The food I offered her was always refused and the smoothies I made, I had to force them down her throat.
Pieces of my heart chipped away every time I looked at what was left of my wife.
I couldn't fix this.
I couldn't make her better.
She wouldn’t accept Einín's death as anything other than her fault. No matter how many times I tried to tell her otherwise, she wouldn’t hear me. She forced the truth away and punished herself for being the victim of a brutal fucking crime.
She was breaking and I was cracking into pieces watching her fall apart.
I was losing this and I couldn't reach her. Nothing I did seemed to reach her.
She was a ghost of the woman she'd once been.
I was trying my hardest, fighting my best, but it wasn't enough. She was incomplete and I couldn't fill the gaping hole Einín had left in my wife. In me…
"I couldn't save my mother." My words caught in my throat as I sat on the edge of the bed in a darkened room with my back facing her. "And now…and now I can't save you…"
"This is not the same thing," I heard her whisper in the darkness, voice flat and void of emotion.
"It's all the same," I said gruffly. Exhaling heavily, I leaned over her body and wiped the tears from her cheeks. "I only want you," I whispered, pressing a kiss to her shoulder. "I don't care if we never have children. I just want you."
"They killed my baby, Noah," she cried out in hoarse raspy voice. "They took her from me and I didn’t protect her."
"I know, Teagan," I said, pressing my forehead to her shoulder. "I know, baby."
"I want them dead," she added flatly. "JD Dennis and everyone he loves."
"I'll kill them all," I whispered – I fucking vowed, pledging vengeance for my daughter. It wasn’t like I hadn't planned it out a thousand times in my mind.
That bastard had taken his last shot at me.
At my family.
Gonzalez had let me down and the cops were too tied up in yellow fucking tape to do anything constructive.
I wasn’t taking any more chances
Not when my wife's life was at stake.
"I promise, Thorn. I'll kill every last one of them."
****
Chapter Eighteen
Noah
Usually I didn’t listen to music at home – I kept it for the gym and workouts – but tonight I blared the volume of the iPod dock in our kitchen to the maximum. Ed Sheeran's 'Give Me Love' flooded my ears.
Necking the half empty bottle of whiskey on the countertop, I chased it with an ice-cold bud. Sinking down on a stool at the island, I continued to pour myself glass after glass of whiskey, desperate to forget where I was, even if it was just for a night.
I couldn't listen to her crying another damn minute.
It was killing me.
It honest to god felt like I was drowning in her sadness.
My life was falling down. Crumbling into the earth. Shattering to pieces.
Before Teagan lost the baby I would have never considered myself a coward. Every day since, I was the winning title holder.
She was on the edge, breaking down, and I was useless to her.
Her guitar was gathering dust. Her clothes were hanging unworn in the closet. I was terrified.
She wasn't eating, she wasn't talking, and I knew she wasn't sleeping either.
Her sobbing kept me awake for most of every night – from a different goddamn room.
This internal, crying, depressed version wasn't something I knew or had the slightest clue of how to handle. Before she craved my touch, now she cowered from it.
I handled the grief the only way I knew how.
With my fists.
I threw myself into my workout regimen, putting in anything up to sixteen hour days.
It was the easy way out.
A way of avoiding the broken hearted woman in my house; the one I had crushed and couldn't put back together again.
"You want company?" Lucky's voice penetrated my mind and I nodded, not bothering to look.
"You know what they say about misery," I slurred, pouring myself another glass.
"Yeah," he said with a sigh as he joined me at the island. Sinking down on the stool beside me, Lucky placed a shot glass in front of himself and grabbed the bottle of Jack. "How's she doing?"
I tipped my glass in the air, gesturing towards the ceiling. The sound of Teagan's muffled screams and cries could still be heard over the music.
Lucky cringed at the sound.
"Do you think you could do something for me?" I asked quietly.
"Anything, man," Lucky replied.
"I want you to put some ink on me," I told him.
His brow cocked up. "We're not in a cell anymore, man. There are better artists out there – and safer ways of having a tattoo done."
"No." I shook my head. "It has to be you."
"Alright," he replied with a stiff nod. "Whenever you want."
"Thanks," I grunted.
"Noah." Lucky poured himself a glass and then refilled mine. "How are you doing?"
"I am dying here, man." I was drunk and broken and too tired to lie. "I can't fix this for her." Tossing back another drink, I grabbed the bottle and clumsily poured myself another. "She's… Christ, they ripped her open and took our baby from her. How does a woman get over something like that?"
Lucky didn’t say anything and I was glad.
He got it.
There was nothing to say.
Nothing could fix this.
"It's my fault," I added, slurring. "I should have stayed away. I should've refused that fight in Ireland – and let her be. But I was selfish. I took what I wanted and my wife is the one paying the price." Slamming my glass down, I dropped my head in my hands. "I let her down, Lucky. I didn't keep her safe. I made her a target and now, they've done it. They've broken her. She's not the same person."
"Noah…"
"Listen to her," I hissed, shaking my head, full of self-loathing and regret. "Listen to my wife. She's… That's not Teagan up there. My wife isn’t here anymore."
"She's still in there," Lucky countered before dropping a hand on my shoulder. "Somewhere deep down inside. That ballsy little wife of yours is still alive."
"She asked me to kill them tonight," I scoffed, tossing back another drink.
Lucky stilled beside me. "What did you say?"
I swallowed the whiskey, enjoying the burn. "I promised her I'd kill every last one."
"Noah, man," he said in a weary tone. "She's delirious with grief. She doesn’t know what she's asking you."
"Maybe not," I replied flatly. "But I know what I promised her."
****
Chapter Nineteen
Noah
Teagan still hadn't left our bedroom and by the end of the following week, I was running out of patience.
Stalking around the house like a madman, I tried to reign it in, but I was about two seconds away from calling a doctor and having her committed.
Teagan couldn't go on like this.
I'd seen depression before.
My mother was schizophrenic. I knew what an episode was. I'd lived it. I'd fucking endured it and I didn't know if I was strong enough to go through all of it again.
I couldn't watch her spiral a minute longer.
Memories of my childhood bombarded me, mixing with the image of my daughter, lying lifeless in my arms, the tiny white ca
sket we laid her to rest in.
It was too fucking much.
I couldn't deal.
Feeling useless wasn't something that came easy to me. It was a fucking alien feeling.
I was grieving, too. It was crushing, fucking paralyzing but nothing I said to Thorn seemed to make a difference.
She was taking this pain on her own.
She was drowning in it.
The doctors called it postpartum depression.
My family called it grief. Nothing I said or did made her feel better.
I was losing her.
I knew she wasn't taking the meds the doctors had prescribed her.
The unopened prescription lay on her nightstand for the past month.
Dark circles were under her eyes. Eyes that were sunken in her face. It was as if the brightness in her hazel eyes had actually dulled. There was no spark there. No sign of life at all. It was like looking at a statue. She didn’t see me anymore. She didn’t see anyone.
She slept all the time. She never left our bedroom. She rarely left the bed, unless it was to go in the bathroom and throw up.
Running out of options, I called the one person in the world who knew what I was going through. Waiting for him to answer caused the nervousness inside of me to intensify.
I never saw myself calling Kyle Carter for help.
Never in a million years.
But here I was.
Desperate and at my wit's end.
"Carter," he said, answering on the fifth ring.
"It's me," I replied, unsure of what else to say. I'd never gone to anyone for help before in my life.
There was a long pause, and then a heavy sigh.
"How you holding up, man?" my oldest brother asked me.
"Not good," I choked out, forcing back the emotion inside of me that was threatening to spill over. "I'm losing her, Kyle," I added quietly.