Regret10 min read
"I Want You to Try Again" — How I Let Him Go and He Came Back
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I pressed my back to the cold bathroom tile and stared at the stick in my hand.
"It’s positive," I whispered to myself, and the word felt too loud in the tiny room.
Adrian Carter's car keys clattered in the hall. I shoved the test into the trash, tried to smooth my face, and walked out.
He stood in the doorway with his coat on, hair still damp, eyes flat as winter glass.
"You're home early," I said.
"Don't touch my briefcase." He stepped back and his voice clipped. "And don't make a show. Stop telling my grandmother things."
"I would never—" I started. His face cut me off.
"Stop pretending," he said. "You only married me because you wanted my grandmother's favor. You think I'm blind?"
I felt my mouth go dry. "Adrian, you know I—"
"Save it." He dropped the briefcase on the table like it burned him. "This marriage was never about you."
My heart slammed. I could not remember the last time he had looked at me like something small and sharp.
"Please," I whispered. "The test—"
He stared at me, then at the trash on the floor where the stick had slipped out. His pupils narrowed.
"You pregnant?" He sounded more curious than kind.
"Yes." My voice was an animal. "It's yours."
He laughed once, a sound empty enough to hurt. "You think I believe that? I watched you take pills. I watched you swallow them every month."
"Adrian, I didn't—" I could not finish.
"Get rid of it," he said. "Now."
He grabbed his coat and left, the door slamming like a verdict.
I held the trash can, the test, the small life that was suddenly everything and nothing.
Two days later, the hospital call came.
"Mr. Carter, Miss Burch is unstable again." The nurse’s voice on the phone was careful. "You might want to come."
"I'll be there." He hung up and didn't even look at me.
At the hospital, Natalia Burch sat by the window like a statue. When I tried to help her off the ledge, she threw water on me and pushed my hand away.
"Get away," she hissed. "Get away from him. Get away."
I moved to pick up the towel she had dropped and she shoved me so hard I hit the corner of a table. Pain exploded in my head and I tasted copper.
"She hit her head," someone shouted. Nurses swarmed. I crawled to my knees and felt a hot, wrong noise inside me.
Adrian grabbed me by the arms. "You did this, didn't you?" He shook me like he wanted answers nailed on me.
"I didn't—" I choked.
"You used him," he said. "You used my grandmother, you used me. I warned you."
I left the hospital before he could spit more accusations. I went to Jessie Faulkner's small apartment and let the shut door be my island.
"You can't stay there," Jessie said the minute she saw me. "You look like you were hammered."
"I am," I said. "My head. My heart. Adrian thinks I'm a liar."
"Then make it simple. Sign the papers. Leave." She pulled a blanket over my knees. "You'll be safer."
"I can't lose this," I told her, and my hands went to the hollow at my waist. "Not now."
Jessie stared at my palm, at the faint roundness I had started to hide under sweaters. "Are you keeping it?"
"I'll take care of it myself," I said. "I won't make him look bad again. I will protect them. I'll—"
"A Callie," Jessie said softly. "Stop doing more for people who hurt you."
I signed the divorce papers three days later and mailed them. I called the clinic to set a time. I told myself it was the brave thing to do. I told myself I was freeing everyone. Mostly I told myself it was true.
"You're sure?" the nurse asked. "You want to go through with it?"
"I'm sure." The word tasted like iron. I signed and the world went quiet.
Adrian called and called after that. His calls filled with a dozen small tones: anger, irritation, confusion. I let them ring.
A week after I left, I watched the old house on the nanny cam that Jessie had helped me set up. I watched Adrian come and go, watched him live in the neat, empty routine he always kept for other people.
"Why didn't you tell me?" Mrs. Carter choked in a phone message to me one night. Her voice was thin with worry. "Why would you leave?"
I couldn't say: because he made me small. Because he accused me. Because I couldn't breathe with his eyes on me.
I went home to my parents' small town by the sea. The wind tasted like salt. I slept on my mother’s couch and watched the tide pull itself away.
"You should stay," my mother said once, as if she had not noticed the years I had gone. "You deserve to be quiet."
I watched the house lights go out in the town. I prepared to be someone else.
Three months passed. I called from time to time. Adrian’s number went straight to silence—until one night it didn't.
He answered on the third ring. "Where are you?" He sounded like he'd been running.
"I'm fine," I said. "Don't—"
"Come back. Just come back for one night." His voice cracked.
I told him no.
"Then don't ever come near me again," he said. His anger was a thin shell. "You signed the papers. I won't stop the divorce."
I let the phone clamp in my hand. I put it down and stared at the sea.
Two nights later, Mrs. Carter got pushed.
I was watching an old feed when I saw the door of the house swing open and a woman storm in. My stomach tightened. The woman shoved the older woman to the floor like a gust of wind. I called and called. I booked the next train.
"Callie?" Jessie’s voice nearly broke when I burst in on her. "What happened?"
"Grandma," I said. "I saw it. I saw the door open. I called. I left."
"You did the right thing," she said. "Go. Now."
At the hospital, the world narrowed. Mrs. Carter's face was pale and worried. When she made it to a bed, she grabbed my hand.
"You came back." She squeezed the fingers that had always clothed hers. "You did right."
Adrian was at the door, hands white on the railing. "What happened?" His voice flailed like a man who'd lost his balance.
"Someone pushed her," I said. "I saw it on the monitor and I called the maid. She called you."
He turned and looked at me. For the first time in years, his face lost its sculpted calm.
"Why didn't you tell me you were back?" he said.
"Because last time I came near you you told me to kill the thing in my belly." I said the words slowly. "You told me to get rid of the child."
"You lied." He took a step closer. "You lied to me about the pills."
"I didn't lie about the baby," I said. "I didn't—"
He crouched down and put his forehead to his knees in a way that made him suddenly small.
"This is my fault," he whispered. "I didn't see you. I didn't—"
While the hospital buzzed, Adrian did something I hadn't seen in him: he went to the police.
"She pushed my grandmother," he told the officers, eyes raw. "I have the footage."
"You have footage?" I asked.
He put his phone in my hand. The clip played: Natalia stormed in, words sharp and quick, then a shove. The room went still. My knees went soft.
"That's her," a nurse said, and faces gathered like a tide.
"We'll take a statement," the officer said.
At the station, Natalia screamed refusal, then lies, then a burst of anger when the evidence closed around her like a net.
"You should have told me," Adrian said to me later, when the adrenaline had bled out and we sat by Mrs. Carter's bed. "I should have known."
"You didn't look," I said. "You only ever saw the worst."
He turned, and in the cold glow of the hospital lights he looked like someone who had run into a wall and kept running.
"I was blind," he said. "I was stupid. I am sorry."
"Words," I said. "They don't fix what you did."
"I know." He stared at the sheet in his hands. "But I am going to fix it. I can't erase the years, but I can try."
He went after Natalia. He filed complaints, he sat with detectives, he handed over every scrap of proof. The city listened.
At the public hearing, people who had seen Natalia with other men came forward. A nurse who had worked with her in the clinic told the truth about staged fits. The room was full: the old neighbor who had once seen Natalia at night, the maid who had called the ambulance, a dozen small witnesses whose names had not mattered before that day.
When the officer read the charges, Natalia went pale.
"You set me up!" she screamed.
The courtroom was loud. Reporters scribbled. Adrian sat rigid, hands clenched. I sat behind him with my coat wrapped around me like armor.
"How do you plead?" the judge asked.
Natalia opened her mouth, closed it, then buried her face in her hands.
"Guilty," she muttered. The word hit the air and splintered off into every corner of the room.
People looked at Adrian like someone who had held his breath until he could breathe again. I felt the old weight lift a little from my chest. The jury of strangers made a choice. The law moved slow and imperfect, but it moved. Natalia was taken away, shouting and pulling at her cuffs.
The press followed. "Adrian Carter brings truth to light," the headline read the next morning. He met the cameras with a steady face and the relief of someone who had stopped pretending.
After the hearing, he found me in the corridor.
"Callie." He took my hand. "I am so, so sorry."
"You made a start," I said. "But you can't buy back four years."
"I know." He swallowed. "Let me try anyway. Please. Let me try to be the man you believed I could be when you first loved me."
"I am tired, Adrian." My voice shook. "I left to live. I left because I couldn't breathe. If you want me, don't ask with words. Show me."
"I will." He looked at me like a man remaking a map. "I want to be a father if you'll let me. But if you say no, I'll let you go."
That night at the hospital, I felt something inside me move. Maybe it was hope. Maybe it was fear. Maybe it was simply the urge to stop being angry enough to break.
"I don't know," I said. "I need time."
"Take as long as you want," he said. "I won't leave."
He stayed. He came to every appointment. He sat through long tests, held my hand when I was anxious, and called Jessie only to tell her how his hands shook when he changed a bandage. He read articles about prenatal vitamins at night and put sticky notes on the fridge.
He bought sunflowers.
"Why sunflowers?" I asked once, as he came in with a half-row of bright heads like small suns.
"You like them." He put them down and a dozen heads bobbed like little questions. "And because they look at the sun, and I want to look at you."
I almost laughed. The city seemed too small to hold all the small, steady things he was doing.
But he did more than flowers. He wrote honest letters and left them on my pillow. He stood in the kitchen at dawn and practiced folding naps into towels. He showed up quietly when Mrs. Carter needed help with small tasks. He apologized in ways that didn't sound expensive.
Four months later, the clinic almost sent me home in a rush when I had a scare. I was admitted for observation. The room hummed. I had been alone a lot in my life, and then suddenly there was a man who watched me breathe like someone who finally knew what to watch.
"Callie?" He sat beside me. "Do you want me to stay?"
"Please," I said. "Don't make me do this alone."
He held my hand and didn't say anything loud. He fixed my hair when it fell over my face. He braved the noise of the machines like a man learning to accept what he had refused to see.
"Do you forgive me?" he asked once, quiet and small as a prayer.
"Not yet." I squeezed his fingers. "But I can try to trust you."
That trust wasn't a moment. It was a long set of mornings. It was him making soup when I couldn't eat. It was him leaving work early to sit in the waiting room and read magazine pages so he wouldn't fall asleep. It was him waiting while I decided what to do about the child.
I almost had the abortion.
Sitting on the plastic chair in the clinic, I felt my hands tremble. The nurse smiled patiently.
"You're brave," she said.
I wrote my name on the form and then crossed it out. My hand shook, but I let it be.
"Callie?" Adrian whispered. He had been there all morning. "What are you thinking?"
"I don't know if I can be a mother who loves with scars," I said. "I don't want to pass these wounds on."
"You won't," he said. "I'll be with you. I'll learn. I will change."
He changed. He proved himself in small endless ways. He learned not to blame me for things he had never tried to see. He learned to listen.
On a noon in early autumn, our son was born. He cried small and fierce and perfect. When the nurse put him in my arms, I smelled the clean newness of him and felt the world tilt a little.
"You're a father," the nurse said to Adrian, who had been hovering like a shadow.
"I am," he said. His voice came out raw and bright.
We named him Milo.
After the first sleepless weeks, when the house settled and Mrs. Carter's steps grew steady again, we stood in the small garden and watched the sun set behind the low roofs.
"Do you remember the sunflowers?" he asked quietly.
"I remember you watering them every two hours," I said.
He laughed and then grew serious. "I want to ask you something." He knelt in front of the tiny patch of soil and pressed a small black seed into my hand. "Plant this in Milo's room. A sunflower seed. For when he grows up and asks why his parents tried. Put the seed in the pot so he can see that sometimes things die and sometimes they come up again."
I pressed the seed between my fingers. "What if it never grows?"
"Then you have a story to tell him," he said. "About the time we were both wrong and tried anyway."
We planted the seed together. I watered it that night, and he watched me as if my hands were a map he needed to learn.
The small green sprout broke soil a week later. Milo slept and sometimes fussed, and once he kicked gently against my ribs and I laughed.
A year passed. The tiny sunflower grew stubborn and bright. People came and went. Natalia's sentence passed by like a clean page. Mrs. Carter's laugh returned like a small bell in the house. Adrian and I learned each other's shadows and stopped mistaking them for cliffs.
One evening, when Milo was two and clapped for the small bird that landed on the fence, I found a folded scrap of paper tucked into the vase with the sunflower.
It was a note in Adrian’s hand, a habit he had begun: a small list of things he would try not to forget. The top line read, "Water the sunflowers. Never call her a liar." Below it he had written, "Watch the baby at dawn."
I smiled and held Milo's small hand. He had sun-yellow hair like a little flame in the afternoon sun.
"Do you ever regret?" I asked him once, under the low porch light when the world went quiet.
He looked at the small house, the sleeping boy, the withered and new things arranged like a life. He thought for a moment.
"I regret being blind for so long," he said. "I lost years while I closed my eyes. But I woke up. I've got you now. I will not close them again."
I let his hand stay in mine. I had scars. He had scars. We lined up our small apologies like pieces of a map and started again.
Years later, when Milo could run and point and ask a thousand small questions, he found that first withered sunflower—kept in a small wooden box above his dresser. It had browned and curled, a memory.
"What's that, Mama?" he asked, wide-eyed.
"That was the first one," I said. "We tried once and it died."
"Try again?" he demanded.
Adrian scooped him up and breathed in Milo's hair. "Always try again," he said.
I put my hand on Adrian's shoulder and felt the steady beat there. We had been small and wrong and brave in turns. We had lost pieces of ourselves and found them again. The sunflower in Milo's small clenched fist would teach him that even when things wilt, sometimes you plant another seed.
And when I tuck Milo into bed at night, I whisper the truth I almost never said at the start of everything: "I chose to love him when I could have left. I chose again."
He is different now. He kneels in the garden with sticky hands and the little notebook he writes in. He is careful and sometimes clumsy with his words.
One afternoon he pushes a slightly browned sunflower into Milo's tiny fingers.
"Keep this," he says. "So you remember we tried."
Milo hugs the flower like a trophy.
I watch them. I press my palm to the window and see my reflection double—two people who had been lost and found—and I think the best endings are not single lines but a row of small tries.
"Try again," I tell the little plant through the glass, and I hear Adrian singing softly behind me, and Milo claps at some bird and the house fills with a sound that is not perfect, but it is ours.
The End
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