UNFORGETTABLE (Able Series Book 3) by Gigi Aceves

to be in a silent holding pattern. He hasn’t asked me to leave as Jake and Cody did Trish and Roxy, but he may as well have. His silence alone is enough to send the message. I’m talking to him—no correction, I’m telling him.
    He walks through the back door surprised to see me waiting for him.
    “We need to talk, please.”
    Brian just looks at me for a second, his eyes slightly narrowing as he takes me in. His eyes swing toward the left, then back at me, then slowly down. He knew this is bound to happen. If he’s the man I know he is, he’ll face me, and he’ll watch me put an end to this.
    He stops right in front of me, crosses his arms, and widens his stance. Typical of someone who’s defensive. I see it all the time with our boys. Unfortunately, today he’s not defending me, he’s defending himself—his actions . . . or lack thereof.
    I take his silence as my cue to start. “When I lost our baby, I didn’t know whether to cry in pain first or cry for our baby’s loss. My heart chose for me. I cried for our loss, for the chance to love our angel, to never find out how she’d look, to never know how his life was gonna be, to never hold her, to rock him, to sing to her, or to even put him in time out. I’ll miss all those events, you know. So not to lose my sanity, I focused on the physical pain. The moment it hit, the amount of blood that trickled down my legs, and the cramping as though someone were cutting me in half. I felt every single tug, every single pull while they cleaned me up and took my angel away from me.” I stop and wipe my eyes. “I want to forget, but I don’t. I want to hope, but I can’t, not without you hoping with me. I’m not blaming you, but every time I look at you, every time I see you like this . . .” I let my hand run up and down as if telling him to look at himself. “ . . . it reminds me of what you refuse to accept, and what I’ve accepted. We’re two worlds clashing against each other and that hurts. It hurts so much. I don’t want to hate you as you hated yourself the first time.”
    “How can you accept it so easily? Tell me! Better yet, show me so I can stop feeling this pain.”
    Shaking my head in disbelief, and maybe accepting the grim reality he’ll never learn to understand me spreads in my heart like a disease, contaminating everything good. “Accepting is the only way for me to cope. It’s our reality, Brian. Can we change it? No—no! Do I want to change it? Yes. I’d change it in a heartbeat, but we . . . I don’t have the power to do that. What’s left is to face the reality to heal. Don’t you get it?”
    “Don’t you think I know that? My head knows it. Fuck, I smelled the blood, I saw what they did. So, yes, my eyes and my brain can comprehend, but let this . . .” He slaps his chest with his palm. “. . . . let my heart fucking grieve. Let it suffer a little while longer. Can’t I do that?”
    “How long? How much longer will you live like this?” Frustration seeps through me like poison, and all reason flies out my head. “You never wanted to have one, right? You said so yourself. So, what’s all this about? For what? Maybe, we should just do this apart from each other.”
    “Wow, that’s a low blow coming from you. My grief, now, has nothing to do with what I said in the past! I’ve asked forgiveness for that, and you’ve given it! So, quit bringing it up.” With his stubborn stance and all too stubborn face, he continues with a slightly calmer nerve, “We can . . . we need to do this together. I’ve lived it. I can . . . I can help you.”
    “You can help me? Really? Being physically near, but emotionally detached from me isn’t helping; it’s only hurting me.”
    “You just have to give me time, because up here . . .” he points at his head as he says, “this is all my fault. Maybe, I shouldn’t have touched you that night. Maybe, I should’ve been more careful. Maybe, it’s in my blood, my genes; I don’t