Cover Reveal and Excerpt!

And though he maintained his cool during the day, Zach hadn’t done so during the night. He was a broken man. I woke up several times and found him in the bathroom, majority of those times drunk, with the water running, trying to muffle his groans, crying his gorgeous eyes out.

I crutched my broken, achy body into the bathroom, turned off the water, and pulled him into my chest so he could let out his grief, while releasing tears of my own. The last time I found him there, he was at his worst.

“Zach?” I called. He ignored me.

I called his name again, crutching in his direction, and he slurred, “Get the hell away from me.” He was glued to the floor in front of the sink, still in his dark blue suit pants, blue Italian collar shirt with the top two to three buttons undone, sleeves rolled-up, and tie loosely undone—and he reeked of a distillery. 

Beside him sat an empty decanter, I was willing to bet, that was once filled with brandy or some kind of Cognac. He’d apparently drank it all. In his right hand was a stuffed teddy bear. Zach, Jr’s stuffed bear that was in the nursery. Zach had bought that bear for our son the day before the car incident.

I crutched closer to Zach and saw that he also had the carved wooden name of our son that my stepbrother, Aaron, had made and given to us during the dual baby shower. Aaron affixed it, securely, to the wall over our son’s crib. Zach evidently forced it off the wall. Why? And with what did he use to force it off?

“Zach?” I called softly. He didn’t acknowledge me, so I called him again, as I moved closer.

“I told you to get the hell away from me. Now leave!” he barked.

I tried to meet eyes with him, but he had them fixed on the carved name, stroking each letter of the wood slowly with a gentle finger, whimpering in the process. I moved in closer and turned off the faucet, and that was when I saw my son’s obituary on the opposite side of him, underneath another decanter, half finished.

Damn, had he really drank that much?

I leaned forward, over him, to grab the remainder of the drink, and he quickly grabbed hold of my wrist with an aggressive grip. “Leave it where it is,” he gritted through his teeth in a dark tone.

The sudden deathly grip scared me, but it was the nefarious tone that he had used that frightened me the most. I’ve never before seen that look in his eyes or heard that tone in his voice. My heart beat fast, and the taste of fear was heavy on my breath. Was Zach capable of harming me in a drunken rage?

Stunned by Zach’s demeanor, I couldn’t release the decanter from my hand. I delayed, and the pressure of his grip tightened. He repeated himself. “Leave it where it is.”

“Ouch,” I wailed. “You’re hurting me, Zach. Let go of my wrist.”

“You let go.” I did—finally—with disgust.

I balanced myself on my crutches and rubbed my wrist while glaring at him. I knew Zach was hurting and grieving our son, which was why instead of getting upset and storming out of the bathroom on two sticks and one good leg or slapping his face, as I initially wanted, I lowered myself on the floor beside him.

“I know it hurts not having him here with us,” I said. “I think about him a lot—about what it would be like if he was here with us. You have the right to feel the way you do. The pain you fe—”

“Don’t psychoanalyze me, Abigail,” he barked. “You are not my fucking psychiatrist. None to be exact.” He scooted over to his left, away from me in what felt and looked like repugnance.

“That wasn’t what I was trying to do. But I am your wife, so I—”

“So now you want to be my fucking wife?”

Ouch! That hurts. “That’s fair,” I admitted, with a few tears falling from my eyes. “I haven’t been much of a mother either. I’m sorry. The pain of losing him hurts a lot—so badly. I love him and I’m trying to find a way to move forward, to be here for you and Gabrielle more, but every time I think about him, I find myself going backwards,” I cried. “It’s so hard, so hard, babe. I feel so empty without him here. For months I felt him moving around inside of me and now he’s—”

“I felt him too, Abi!” he shouted, looking at me angrily with hurt and angst, tears racing down the features of his handsome face. The whites of his beautiful eyes were red from him crying so much. “I…felt…my…son…move…too,” he said in a low grit. “Every fucking time I put my hands on your stomach, I felt him move around, kicking and interacting with me. With me,” he emphasized, slapping his hand hard against his chest. “He responded to me, Abi. It was as if he knew who I was—that I was his dad. Every time I spoke to him or shook your stomach, just a little, to play with him, he started kicking and moving around. Do you not remember that?” he cried.

“I do,” I said, sliding closer to him. “I remember every minute of it.” I pulled his head into my lap, hoping he would allow me to comfort him.

He didn’t push away from me this time; he only wrapped his arms around me tightly, looked up at me, and cried, “He was my son, too. My namesake. And I love him so much. I anticipated his arrival just as you had. I wanted to be a dad so badly, Abi. So badly,” he cried, looking and obviously heartbroken, devastated. “I envisioned myself being a great dad to him—holding him while he smiled up at me, singing to him—well trying to sing to him—feeding him during the midnight hours with one of those glass bottles we bought him because you were too tired to breastfeed him. Hell, I even saw myself watching you breastfeed him, being proud of our family that we were growing. But now—now I will never get that experience with him—with my baby boy. So you’re not the only one who was attached to him or is taking what happened hard. Okay? I want my son here, too. There isn’t a second of the day that I don’t think about him, Abi. I want my fucking son, too!”

As Zach lay in my lap, crying and shedding his grief, I listened and comforted him, wiping his tears away from his pained and grieved face, smoothing out his medium thick eyebrows, running my fingers through his thick, dark curly hair, and kissing his delectable lips that were covered in amber heat.

My husband was in more pain than I could have ever imagined, and I cursed and scolded myself for not being there for him when he needed me most. Damn, I really failed him there, especially given how he was always by my side when I needed him.

After a long silence, Zach started snoring in my lap, head buried in my crotch and arms tightly wrapped around me. That was just great—he was too damn drunk to stand on his own, I assumed, and I was operating on one good leg and the aid of crutches. So how in the hell was I going to get six-foot-three inches, two hundred twenty pounds of lean muscles, drowned in drunkenness, off the floor?

© V. R. Avent