He didn’t regret asking Tamara to confide in him, but he was ill-prepared.
Questions bounced through his mind. All he came out with was, “What happened?”
“I lost them all.”
Four small words. So stark. And carrying such an incredible depth of pain. He admired her for being able to sit there relatively composed.
He’d asked for this. He owed it to her to see it through. “Why?”
Her smirk, and accompanying shrug, held grief he was pretty sure he couldn’t even begin to imagine.
“There was no obvious explanation,” she said. “My husband and I both went through a battery of tests. Sometimes genetics aren’t compatible. There’re myriad physical causes. But nothing showed up. Which was why they said there was no reason we shouldn’t keep trying.”
So many questions. Things he wanted to ask. But this wasn’t the time.
What did she need him to know?
“And you tried four times.”
She nodded. Took a sip of wine. “Yep.” She was staring at her glass and he wondered what she saw there. Wished there was some way he could take on some of her pain, help her deal with it.
Alana Gold had taught him well on that count, too. When he’d been able to keep her happy, she’d stayed clean. It was when she’d needed things he couldn’t provide that they’d lost everything.
Tamara Frost had helped him. He felt deeply compelled to help her in return.
“Then what?”
Her gaze shot to his. “What do you mean, then what?”
He squeezed her hand, let it go. “Did they eventually discover a reason for what was happening? What was going wrong?”
She shook her head. “No.” And when she looked at him again, there was a mixture of determination and vulnerability in her glistening eyes. “I couldn’t do it anymore,” she said. “I don’t even want to be pregnant. I can’t bear the thought of all those weeks of fear and hope, the unknown, not being in control. My own frenetic state of mind would create issues even if the fetus was healthy...”
“And your husband?” It seemed the appropriate time to ask that one.
“We’re divorced, by mutual agreement. By the time we lost Ryan, we’d already drifted so far apart...”
“Ryan?” She’d named each lost fetus?
“He was viable,” she said as though that explained everything. It didn’t.
“I don’t—”
“The others... I lost them at six, nine and eleven weeks. Still within the first trimester. But Ryan... He made it far enough to have a chance of survival. I could feel him moving inside me. I was showing. And I was sure that with him—”
She’d lost her last hope with the loss of her fourth child. Understanding came softly, but clearly. Because she was talking to someone who knew exactly when he’d lost his last hope.
Eight years before, when his mother had used the home he’d bought her to run a drug lab, implicating him in her criminal acts.
After that he couldn’t help Alana anymore. Couldn’t have anything to do with a future that involved her being out of prison and the two of them together. He’d visited her, because he loved her. Because she’d given him life. But he’d kept an emotional distance that had been necessary for his own mental health.
“There comes a time when you have to let go,” he said aloud. Whatever the cause of the emotional pain, there came a time when you knew you’d reached the end of your ability to cope. You had to turn away. Say no more. “Ryan was your time.”
Her gaze locked with his, those green eyes large, their gold rims more pronounced. “You get it.”
He did.
And while he had no idea where it left them, with Diamond Rose sleeping in the next room, he knew for certain that their meeting had been no mistake.