“Did they know about the abortion?”
He shakes his head. I see it then, an old, familiar guilt that has never fully gone away.
“Helen made me promise not to tell anyone, not that I would have,” he says. “She started her job, then I got word I’d been awarded a fellowship to study in Madrid for a year. When Helen heard about it, she flipped out. Said she’d never have taken the Stanford job if she knew I’d leave in six months, that she did it because of my parents. Then she told me she was pregnant again.”
“But you—”
“She’d stopped taking the pill. Didn’t tell me. I shouldn’t have relied on her to deal with birth control. But I did, and that’s what happened.”
“But you weren’t married. I mean, I thought your plan was marriage, then kids.”
“It was.”
“So what…” It hits me then, like a blow to the gut. “You married her, didn’t you?”
He nods, his jaw tightening. “There was a lot of pressure from our parents. I wanted to do the right thing. Thought it would work, that everyone would be glad. That it’d all fit, you know?”
My chest burns, and I have to remind myself to breathe. Part of me understands this about Dean—his intense urge to fix things, to prove himself a success, even at the expense of his own happiness.
Another larger part of me can’t process the magnitude of this revelation.
“Why… why didn’t you tell me?” My voice is tight, strained.
“Because I still don’t think of it as a real marriage.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“Helen and I had gone through grad school together, we had similar career goals, on paper we were a perfect match. But it didn’t happen the way it was supposed to. It was like the plan went totally off course.”
“What happened to the baby?”
“Helen lost it at thirteen weeks. She’d told a lot of people early on. She was excited. Then when she had the miscarriage, we had to tell all those same people about it. That was rough.”
“Then what happened?” I ask, not at all certain I want to know.
“She got pregnant again four months later. Second time, she told only my parents and hers, but she lost that one at nine weeks. Third time—”
“Third time?”
He nods. “Didn’t tell anyone until she was into her second trimester, but then, fifteen weeks in… ah hell, Liv, it was all so shitty.”
“Oh, Dean.” Some of the wind goes out of me at the thought of another woman, of Dean, contending with three miscarriages.
“Yeah, well, that was it.”
“What do you mean—that was it?”
“Everything unraveled after that. She was devastated, I was convinced it all had something to do with the abortion and I blamed myself for not having stopped it… and soon neither of us could figure out why we’d gotten married in the first place.”
He shakes his head. “Helen’s parents blamed me, said I should be the one working, that I was putting her under too much stress. They were right. I wasn’t doing enough. But I didn’t know what enough was.
“Even though Helen and I both had normal genetic test results, I didn’t want to try again, thought it was too much. Helen had this idea that we needed to be a perfect couple, we had to have a baby, but we couldn’t agree on anything. Fought all the time. Finally she filed for divorce. I didn’t contest it.”
I sit there for a long time, processing what he’s just revealed.
My stomach twists sharply. Dean knows everything about me, even the black, raw parts. I’d thought I knew everything about him but ever since I brought up the idea of a baby, I’ve sensed I was missing something. Now I know my instincts were right.
I haven’t known my husband completely.
Tears sting my eyes. I blink them away.
“It was tough on Helen,” Dean continues. “Tougher than I can imagine. And I couldn’t be… what she wanted. I didn’t even know what that was. I tried… we went to counseling, I tried to get her to take a year off, offered to put my research on hold until we figured it out. All we ended up doing was fighting about work, about trying again, what our marriage should be, what it wasn’t…”
“Why didn’t your parents ever say anything?” I ask, even though I know the answer, know that this miserable failure of a marriage was just one other thing the West family would cover up with layers of brittleness and suppressed anger.
“My family doesn’t talk about the shitty stuff, Liv.”
My heart lurches. I push to my feet, an ache filling me. “And neither do you.”
“What?”
I whirl to face him. A riot of emotions spins in my head. “You’re still doing it! You spent so many years trying to fix your family, to be the hero, while all these secrets festered and none of you would acknowledge them.”
I struggle to take a breath, feel my heart beating too fast. “And you told me before we got married that you didn’t want to do that anymore. You didn’t want to try and prove yourself to them, you wanted your life to be about what you wanted…”