She slept less than she had when Cordelia was a newborn, pushing the limits of the human body while at the edges of what a mind can endure. Very few memories stuck in that hellscape. But she remembered some things.
A cool hand on her forehead.
Gentle words in her ears.
Warm arms around her shaking shoulders.
Poppy moved in and did not leave. She washed vomit out of Rose’s hair, cooked elaborate meals Rose would not eat, held her when she succumbed to snippets of sleep, and would not leave her side no matter how loud she screamed when she woke up.
Landon must have been somewhere. She knew he had to be somewhere. He had been there when the doctor said the words that had changed their world forever.
Epidural hematoma.
More commonly known as a brain bleed. There had just been too much blood. That blood had pooled too fast, putting too much pressure on her skull, compressing her brain until she was no longer Cordelia.Too much blood, Rose thought.Too fast. Like mother, like daughter.
Landon had been there, a stoic statue to contrast her wild, scattered, wailing grief, when Poppy had delivered them both home from the hospital. Then he’d descended to the basement and hadn’t returned.
There was a piece of her that cried out for him, the only other person on earth who could understand her pain. Any minute now, she knew, it would be his cool hand on her forehead, his gentle words in her ear, his warm arms around her shaking shoulders.
Day after day, he did not come.
Day after day, she lay on the ground next to the empty crib. Wake, sleep, dream, wake, sleep, dream, hold your eyes open with your fingertips. Day after day, and the pain did not ease.
Until Rose was not sure how many days she had left in her.
The nursery was decorated with photographs. It was something their friends had joked about—the self-indulgence of it all—butthe criticism had not fazed Landon and Rose. Cordelia’s first bath, first tooth, first Halloween; Cordelia napping on Rose’s shoulder, spitting up her first taste of spinach, snuggling into the folds of her father’s flannel—they were all there, layered on the wall in thin gold frames. She knew she should have asked Poppy to take the pictures down. But they were so beautiful. In each image, Landon had frozen time at just the right moment.
Rose stood and ran her fingers down the photograph nearest to her hand, strumming her daughter’s round cheeks like a guitar. They hurt, so much, those pictures. Rose doubled over with the pain of it, retching up the nothing in her stomach. Her vision blurred and the siren’s song found her. This time, she was not tied to the mast.
What would it feel like,the voice asked,not to belong to these photographs? To take them in like a woman wandering a gallery, a woman who sees a beautiful child, nothing more. What would it feel like,the voice asked,to forget? Not to remember the weight of her in your arms, the sound of her voice. To be nothing but empty space and endless possibility. Could you live then?
When Poppy knocked on the nursery door, she must have seen the certainty in Rose’s eyes. Because when Rose told Poppy her plan, she didn’t ask a single question. All she said was, “Let me help you.”
Chapter Thirty-Three
Rose finally opened those eyes he loved so much. They were somehow darker than he remembered. Different, even, from the eyes he’d stared into the last few days, desperate for a second chance.
“Where were you, Landon?” Rose asked.
“What are you talking about?” he asked earnestly. Then? Now? In this low light, time had lost all sense of linearity.
“I needed you,” she said. He caught a glimpse of her as she’d looked fourteen years ago: the most unusual mix of credulous and hardened. “I needed you so much. And you didn’t try. God, it just—” She held her head in her hands, shaking it this way and that. “It kills me that you didn’t try.”
That was all it took, and he was there again, hugging his legs into his chest so tight he could feel the imprint of his feet along his spine.
Conor had taken one look at him in the dark, on the couch in the basement, crumpled into himself, and decided to move in. When Landon’s thoughts raced, Conor played mindless television on loop. When his stomach emptied involuntarily, again and again, Conor washed his face with warm washcloths and foundhim clean clothes. When he woke from sweet dreams back into the nightmare, Conor held his hand.
He knew Rose had been there, somewhere. She had been there when the doctors told them what Landon, in his carelessness and distraction, had done. She must have been there when he’d collapsed on the couch and didn’t get back up for days, all but ignoring his body’s pleas to take care of its most basic of functions. He hadn’t managed to push through the shame and shock to make the journey upstairs to confirm.
Landon had never wanted to have this conversation. It was why he had written their story down. It was why his second chance with Rose had dazzled and charmed him, adopting a pseudonym as much about winning her love in two lifetimes as it was about becoming somebody new. If he was somebody new, he would not have to say it out loud. He could just live.
But here she was, forcing his hand. So he named the big, terrible thing.
“It was my fault,” he said.
Silence stretched between them.
“It was my fault,” he said again. The words tasted stale and rotten, aged as they were by the long months he had held them back. “It was my fault.” Once he’d started, he could not stop. “It was my fault. My fault, my fault, my fault.” He pounded his forehead with his fists. “It was my fault.” He closed his eyes and imagined Cordelia’s face, imagined, as he had so many times before, taking his foot off the brakes and rolling through that intersection to the other side—delivering his child safely to the other side, before that truck had had the chance to barrel into them from behind, where he never could have seen it coming. “Ishould be dead,” he said. “I wish I was dead and she was here every day, Rose. Howcould I have been there for you? You deserved help. Support. You deserved to be as far away from me as possible. I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t sleep—” The pain hit him in the chest, sudden and sharp, and he doubled over, trying not to retch onto the floor. “She was always there, in my dreams. Alive. Then I would have to leave her. Every night, having to leave her.” He shook his head. “It was fucking hell. It was torture. And it was my fault.” He looped the phrase over and over, the words and their impact circling back around to slap him in the face. “It was my fault.”