I smiled at my youngest niece, Adalyn, as she tried to sneak long green beans back into the bowl. I shook my finger at her playfully and watched her five-year-old face turn red from embarrassment.
Even Nick thought my nieces were precious. He had one brother, but Jared was younger than us and not married yet, so Delaney and Adalyn were all we had. Both of us loved to have them over so we could spoil them or take them to fun things around the city.
They gave us the excuse to eat chicken nuggets shaped like dinosaurs and watch cartoons.
I might not have appreciated his attitude toward my mother, but he had always been the best uncle. He would have made a phenomenal father.
If only things had been different for us.
After Josh and I cleaned off the table and started on the dishes, a job that was still ours no matter how old we got, I felt his probing eyes on me. I could feel the serious conversation brewing between us, but I had hoped to avoid this awkward portion of the afternoon.
“I thought you would get back with him by now,” he said out of the blue, with soap bubbles up to his elbows and a porcelain platter squeezed between his hands.
I nearly dropped the wet glass I was drying on the linoleum floor. “What?”
“I didn’t think you were serious about the divorce,” he explained. “I thought you guys might be having a rough patch, but I always expected you to work through it.”
My stomach churned and my heart squeezed with racing panic. I tried to keep my voice steady when I replied, “It was worse than a rough patch.”
“He didn’t hit you or anything, did he?” Josh paused mid-rinse to look at me seriously.
I hated that people always jumped to that conclusion. Did all men have this hard of a time divorcing? Were they always silently questioned about spousal abuse?
“He never touched me like that, Josh. Don’t ever think he did. We just… we don’t get along. We’re not right for each other.”
“You haven’t really tried,” he countered immediately. “You guys are still newlyweds. Give it some time.”
“We’ve been married for seven years.”
My brother was nothing if not persistent. He got it from our mother. “It’s nothing a couple kids won’t fix. Try that. See what a baby can do for you guys. You could still save this.”
I sucked in a sharp breath and kept my tumbling thoughts to myself. I could have told him that I hadn’t talked to my husband in four months and that if he wanted to speak to me, he would have by now. If he had cared just a little bit about salvaging what we had, he would have reached out. I could have told Josh that we knew each other too well. That our faults had become walls that kept the other out and that our fights had scarred us so deeply we would never heal.
I should have told him that a baby wasn’t a magical potion that made people stop fighting and every problem disappear.
But instead, I told him the reason that would shut him up for good, the one thing he couldn’t argue with.
“We did try to have kids.” My voice was a shaking whisper, reflecting all of the shattered emotions I couldn’t reconcile. “We tried for two years.”
He was silent for a long time. I had kept this to myself during our entire struggle. Only Nick knew how desperately I wanted a baby and how impossible it seemed. We hadn’t told our parents or our families because we wanted to avoid this moment. We wanted to avoid the questions and the pity and the attempts to understand something that devastated both of us-something we couldn’t understand ourselves.
“Oh,” Josh finally groaned. “I wondered-”
“It’s me,” I said quickly. “Or at least that’s what our lab results say. I’m the one that stopped it from happening.”
My brother had rolled up the sleeves to his oxford and looked out of place next to the sudsy water and pile of dirty dishes. He had the face of a corporate man. He was all clean angles and sharp edges.
But at this moment, he looked as lost as I felt.
“That’s not a reason to get a divorce, Katie.” His rasping rumble grated against my heart and I wanted to cry.