Then came a single phone call, a sterile hospital room, and a doctor whose face said everything before he even spoke.
My husband, Ryan, left a month after the funeral. Not because he didn’t love Luke. Because he couldn’t stand watching me grieve.
“I can’t do this anymore,” he’d said, his suitcase already packed.
“You’re not the same person.”
I wasn’t. How could I be?
The divorce papers came a month later. Last I heard, he’d moved two states away with someone younger, someone without the weight of dead children in her eyes.
I stopped going to places with kids.
Stopped attending family gatherings. Stopped answering when friends called to “check in.”
The sound of a baby crying could drop me to my knees. It didn’t matter where I was.
Grocery store, parking lot, even just a TV commercial. That sound ripped straight through me, like my body still believed I had a child to soothe, even though my arms were empty.
