What He Doesn't Know (What He Doesn't Know Duet, #1)

by Kandi Steiner

Those marks on your stomach, while they are forever a part of you, they do not define you. They are not a sign of your weakness or of your failure.” I smiled then, rubbing the pad of my thumb along her cheek. “They are a reminder of your strength, of your love, and of the miracle of life.”

How long had I wanted Cameron to hold me that way, to fall to his knees and kiss the scars left by our children? How long had I silently begged him to talk about it, to acknowledge it, to let me know it was real? With Cameron, it was as if those months, that day, those roughly two-hundred-and-sixteen hours, as if none of it had happened at all. He was able to pack away the nursery — out of sight, out of mind — while I lived with the scars they left behind.

For Cameron, there was before, a big blank, empty space, and then after. But we never talked about the catalyst that propelled us from the first to the latter.

Death changes us. It takes everything we thought we knew about our lives and fast pitches it out the window, shattering the glass in the process. Wind whips in, hard and cold, and throws everything we’d had neatly in place flying around the room. No one is the same once they lose someone they love. They just have to learn to exist in the new world, no matter how messy it is.

But if I was a river, and he was the ocean, then Cameron was the storm that raged over the point where we met. And lightning was about to strike.

When our sons died, the hardest part of all of it was that Charlie didn’t realize that she wasn’t the only one who lost them. I may not have cried the way she did, and I may not have spent weeks in bed, and I may not have had the right words to tell her how I was feeling — but I was hurting, too. I lost them, too.

They say there are two sides to every story, and it was in that moment, in that dark, desperate snapshot of my life that I realized I hadn’t asked him for his.