Not the emptiness in my chest.
Not the jagged ache in my soul.
Not even the absolute devastation swirling in my stomach.
Rob was gone.
Jessica was gone.
And people just expected me to carry on without them.
I’d spent two days in the hospital, crying myself into a state of nothingness.
The doctors diagnosed me with a concussion. They gave me oxygen for my lungs, antibiotics to prevent infections in the burns on my arms and legs, and even a sedative to help me sleep.
Nothing eased the pain.
Nothing ever would.
It was an accident. While the four of us had sat upstairs, laughing and drinking wine, a faulty pipe had filled the basement with enough gas to take out the entire house. The second explosion was from Jessica’s car catching fire in the garage. According to the well-meaning but completely tone-deaf fire inspector, we’d been lucky to survive.
I didn’t feel lucky. Though maybe Eason did.
Eason.
Jesus…Eason.
We’d been whisked away in different ambulances to separate hospitals and hadn’t spoken since.
There was no rulebook on behavior in the middle of a catastrophic tragedy. Desperation doesn’t come with courtesy or kindness. But it shouldn’t have come with this much blame.
Yet, even as I lay in that bed, there was a conflicted part of me that wanted to rage at the world for what it had taken from me. A lot of the anger was aimed at Eason.
He was always the loser in my little what-if games.
What if we hadn’t been there that night?
What if he hadn’t been trying to get back into Jessica’s good graces?
What if he hadn’t bought that house in the first place?
Of all the people, why did he have to survive?
Why wasn’t it Rob?
Why wasn’t it Jessica?
Why…Eason?
Still, he’d saved my life. Even through my heartbreak, I knew I should have been on my knees, thanking him. My kids still had their mom because of him. I still had a chance to watch them grow up—graduations, weddings, grandkids.
Because of Eason, I still had a future.
Though being trapped in a spiral of grief didn’t afford me many opportunities to focus on the silver lining.
Our neighbor Evelyn, the incredible woman she was, had taken a few days off work to stay with all three of the kids while Eason and I were in the hospital. None of us had a lot of family support. My parents had been dead for years, and Rob’s mother was elderly with dementia. Eason had no one. He’d grown up without a dad, and his mom had died of breast cancer a few years back. Jessica’s family was beyond worthless. They would no doubt show up at the funeral, sobbing dramatically over her casket, but they would be gone again before she was even laid to rest.
It had never been an issue before. We were the family. Me, Rob, Jessica, Eason.
And then there were two.
As if he’d been summoned from my thoughts, the doorbell rang and my stomach knotted.
I’d gotten home from the hospital the day before, and after I’d told Asher about his father and had a nervous breakdown in my bedroom, Evelyn had insisted on staying one more night. The woman was amazing. I didn’t know what I would have done without her.
Over a somber breakfast where Asher sat in my lap, absently pushing his food around his plate, and Luna and Madison sat in highchairs playing tug-of-war with a sippy cup, Evelyn had told us Eason had been released from the hospital. She’d smiled and tickled Luna’s stomach, saying something about how excited he was to come get his baby girl.
And that was how I’d ended up upstairs, lying in bed, having a conversation with my dead husband rather than sorting through the myriad of warring emotions that accompanied the idea of seeing Eason.
The doorbell rang again.
“Shit,” I sighed, rolling out of bed, a staggering combination of guilt and panic colliding in my chest.
Grief was a complex emotion. My brain told me it was just Eason. Rob’s best friend. Jessica’s husband. I’d spent countless Christmases, birthdays, and summer vacations with the guy. But the dark and bitter parts inside my shattered heart told me he was the man who had survived while the charred fragments left of my husband and my best friend lay in a funeral home across town. Yes, he’d saved my life, but in doing it, he’d sentenced them both to death.
It wasn’t fair and it wasn’t right. But don’t worry—I hated myself for surviving too.
Be nice, I heard Rob say in my head as I made my way down the stairs.
“I’m always nice,” I replied, fully aware it was as much a lie as it was unnecessary. There was no one left for me to convince.
Taking my time to mask my emotions, I slowly walked to the door. I assumed Evelyn had already let him in when I heard his deep, raspy voice in the entryway.
“Hey, baby,” he cooed. “God, Daddy missed you.” His voice broke at the end, and as much as I didn’t want it to, it cracked in my heart too.
Eason clung to his daughter, shoulders shaking, his bandaged hand cupping the back of her head. But as soon as my feet hit the bottom stair, his sunken, red-rimmed eyes jumped to mine.
I froze, unable to so much as breathe under the weight of his gaze. I’d never witnessed such raw desolation before. Not even when I looked in the mirror.
Dark circles hung under his eyes, which were barely supported by his hollow cheeks. I hadn’t been eating, either, but Eason looked like he’d lost significant weight. Had I not known it was him, I would have had to do a double take. His sandy blond hair, which was usually messy on the top, had been shaved, and a long line of stitches started above his eyebrow, disappearing somewhere at the top of his skull. The sleeve of colorful tattoos on his left arm was covered in bandages, but scabs and burns were prominent on his neck and face.
Eason had always been larger than life. But as he stood in my foyer, holding his daughter, his whole body sagged as if it were too much for his skeleton to support.
“Hey,” he rasped.
The knot in my stomach twisted painfully. “Hey.”
We stared at each other for a long second, a million words hanging in the air between us, but we both knew that none of them would change our reality.
My nose stung as I watched him shift Luna to his hip.
He’d lost his wife.
His house.
His closest friend.
All of his possessions.
That little girl in his arms was everything he had left.
I was as far as one could get from the sainthood my husband had teased me about, but grief, bitterness, and devastation aside, I was still a human looking at another human who was lost in the pits of despair. I didn’t have much to offer him in the way of emotional support, but I had resources Eason didn’t.
“What are you planning to do?” I asked, crossing my arms over my chest as though the chill were in the room and not inside me.
He looked down at the tile floor. “Ah, that’s a good question. A guy I used to gig with is going to let us crash in his guest room for a few nights. I need to get in touch with the insurance company and see what my options are for housing, but I haven’t made it that far yet. Luckily, Jessica overpacked for Luna to stay here and my buddy brought me a bag of clothes he’d collected.”
He paused and drew in a shaky breath. “It’s like this domino effect, ya know? I don’t have my wallet. Which means I don’t have my debit card. But I gotta have an ID to get money from the bank. Not that cash really does you any good these days. Without a credit card, I can’t get a new phone, which is what I need for the insurance company to call me back. Meanwhile, I have no car, no way to get a car, and somehow during all of this, I have to figure out how to bury my wife.”