Ash to Dust (Falling Ash Book 2) Read online

  Silas’ expression remains serious, but with his slight nod, I have his agreement to move forward with the plan. He only glances at Joseph before directing his full attention toward the patio counter where he will grill the meat he has prepared for us.

  Joseph looks even more uncomfortable and anxious now, prompting me to nudge him by the shoulder toward one of the wrought-iron chairs at the patio table.

  “Take a seat,” I insist, pushing him down by the shoulders to ensure that he does what I’m asking. “Relax and have your drink. I’ll get the answer you need, but I want you to enjoy the rest of your birthday.”

  He nods and seems to relax a bit, and when I’m convinced he’s pulled himself together enough, I give him one last smile and walk back toward the house.

  I step through the back door into the kitchen to find Jake digging in the tall black freestanding cabinet against the wall in front of me. He’s no doubt looking for creative ways to make something to go with our venison, resigned to digging into what’s left of our non-perishable food while we wait for the seeds and seedlings in the garden to grow and replenish our food supply.

  Jake glances over at me just as I’m closing the door behind me. “Is Joseph relaxing yet?” he asks with worry.

  “I think he will be soon,” I reply truthfully, even though Jake has no context to understand the reason for my prediction. “That drink you gave him should help.”

  With a quick nod, Jake returns his attention to the cabinet in front of him, looking just as perplexed as he did when I first walked into the kitchen.

  “That damned garden can’t grow fast enough,” he grumbles before stepping back and sighing heavily.

  “You’ve done a great job cooking with what we’ve had,” I argue. “I’m sure you’ll figure something out.”

  He doesn’t seem to share my optimism, but he doesn’t fight me on my point, either. Particularly in the last year, Jake has taken it upon himself to be the primary chef in the house, honing the culinary skills he picked up from our parents over the years. I never had the time to learn those skills back when I lived at home. I was too busy practicing the violin and performing all the time.

  As I walk the long way around the kitchen island toward the doorway to the dining room, Jake looks at me again and asks, “Where are you off to?”

  I try to keep an even face. It’s hard to hold back my excitement over the test I’m about to take. “I need to do something,” I respond casually. “It will only take a few minutes.”

  My heart suddenly begins to race at the thought that within the next few minutes, I will know definitively whether Joseph’s seed has taken hold inside of me. Joseph will get the answer he needs, and Silas and I will know whether we’ll finally get to have the child we’ve been trying to conceive for so long.

  Jake smiles, but I can tell he’s mostly trying to hide his concern. With the anticipation pulsing through me, though, I don’t want to spend any more time standing here explaining myself, so I quickly walk into the dining room and down the front hallway to the bathroom.

  When I’m inside with the door closed and locked behind me, I quickly dig to the bottom of the small covered basket I keep in the corner that is mostly filled with extra toiletries and feminine products. By the time I find the pregnancy test box and remove it from the basket, my hands are shaking slightly, and I begin to feel lightheaded.

  I move to the toilet and quickly pull down my jeans and underwear to take a seat before I get too close to passing out. Closing my eyes, I take the time needed to ease away the anxiety and nausea that threatened to overtake me just seconds before. The feeling subsides more with each deep breath I take, and once I’m calmed and collected enough, I open my eyes and begin opening the pregnancy test.

  I’m about to rip the packaging when I see something strange: some light spotting on my underwear. At first I’m overwhelmed with concern about why it’s there, but then I remember Silas telling me that spotting is a potential sign of pregnancy.

  This could be it. As difficult as this plan has been for us to deal with, it might have actually worked. There might be new life growing within me to expand our little family.

  Holding back my tears at these thoughts, I finish unwrapping the plastic stick and hold it underneath me to pee on the open end. I feel every thump of the rapid pulsing of my heart within my chest as I set the stick aside on the white ceramic sink and finish using the toilet.

  When I stand up and flush it, I see evidence of more blood on the toilet paper as it swirls down the pipe and disappears. My eyes immediately dart to the pregnancy test that still doesn’t show a result. My gaze remains fixed there while I pull up my underwear and jeans, and when I have nothing left with which to distract myself, I lean forward with my hands on the sink next to the test, anxiously awaiting its result.

  A line suddenly begins to form in the small white oval where the results should appear. For a moment I forget to breathe while I wait for the result to finalize.

  I wait and wait. Thirty seconds go by, but only the one line remains.

  I look at the simple legend stamped on the plastic stick that reveals the truth of the results. There are only three words and two small pictures there. Two of those words are my truth.

  Two of those words are my devastation.

  Not pregnant.

  I pick up the stick and shake it as if the thing is broken and as though my jostling it might fix it, but the single line remains. It lies there openly in that damned white oval—taunting me, stealing all of my dreams away, leaving me feeling alone and empty inside.

  Leaving me with nothing.

  After dropping the useless stick into the trash, I go through the motions of putting a thin pad in my underwear and washing my hands. I step out of the bathroom feeling completely dazed and confused.

  I don’t really know where I’m going as I wander slowly across the entryway down toward the hall to the living room. When I arrive there, I take a seat on the off-white couch across from the coffee table and the matching armchairs behind it, feeling completely different than I did when I walked into this house just minutes ago.

  A few minutes. A few minutes were all it took for me to find out that I might have had it wrong this whole time.

  Maybe the problem preventing us from conceiving a child has nothing to do with Silas.

  Maybe it’s all because of me.

  4

  My thoughts inevitably linger on all of the conversations I’ve had with Silas about this attempt to have a baby. At first he was completely against the idea, too worried about the potential for complications during childbirth and the dangers of bringing a young life into this crumbled world. By the time he had warmed up to the idea and we discussed it with Joseph and Jake to get their blessing, Silas’ excitement at the thought of parenthood almost rivaled my own.

  When we realized after the first few months of trying to conceive that we were having difficulties, Silas immediately blamed himself, convinced that this was his punishment for all of his life’s horrible actions. No matter how much I tried to make him understand that he shouldn’t shoulder all of that blame, he continued to let it affect him every day. He knew the chances were greater that he had the infertility issues preventing us from conceiving, and he never let me think otherwise.

  Or maybe I never let myself think otherwise. Maybe I wanted a child so much that I was blind to any reality in which I was the cause of our difficulties.

  Footsteps approach from down the hall, pulling me from my thoughts and back into reality. I look and see Jake is about to turn the knob of the door that leads upstairs to the bedroom that Silas and I share, but he stops with surprise when he sees me sitting on the couch in the living room.

  He looks at me questioningly. “There you are. What are you doing?” When he steps closer to see me more fully, his eyes widen with concern, and he quickly moves around the couch to sit next to me. “What’s wrong? Why are you crying?”

  My eyes automatically respond by b
linking, and when I feel the drops of tears release from them, I realize that my cheeks are stained with other tears already.

  I scramble to wipe them all away as if they were never there, even though Jake has already seen them. After drawing in a shaky breath, I open my mouth to try to explain myself, but the words don’t seem to want to come out right now.

  Jake turns his body directly toward me and takes my hands in his, pulling on them slightly to force me to face him as he asks, “Do you want me to go get Silas?”

  “No,” I respond immediately, having no trouble speaking that word in my panic at the thought of explaining myself to Silas right now.

  My thoughts naturally turn next to what it will be like to tell Joseph about this. Will he be relieved? Will he be disappointed? Will he continue to hate himself for what he did at my request?

  “I don’t think Silas is the reason why I haven’t become pregnant,” I say quietly to Jake.

  His brow furrows. “What makes you say that?”

  “We’ve done everything we can to increase the chances of success.” I wince at my own words, knowing the extreme lengths that we went to in order to conceive a child, even if it wasn’t Silas’ biological child. “Nothing has worked.”

  “Sometimes it just takes time,” Jake says encouragingly. “You know some couples have a harder time than others.”

  I shake my head in disagreement, internally frustrated that I can’t tell him the full truth of why I think he’s wrong. “I was convinced it worked this time. I was so confident that I took a pregnancy test just now, but it was negative.”

  Something changes in Jake’s expression, as if this situation has suddenly become very real and serious to him. He lets go of my hands and leans back against the couch, running his fingers through his brown hair with a distressed look on his face.

  For some reason, it feels like I have upset him and need to apologize. “Sorry. This is probably too much information for a sister to give her brother.”

  Jake shakes his head and looks at me with unease still prominent in his expression. His lips part as he’s about to speak, but nothing comes out. Now he’s the one having trouble finding the right words to say.

  He closes his eyes for a long moment, then reopens them, but he avoids my gaze. “I’ve watched you and Silas struggle with this for a while now. I’ve seen how it has affected Silas, and now I’m seeing its impact on you.”

  My heart rate quickens automatically at the unknown direction this conversation with my brother is taking.

  “There’s something I need to tell you,” he informs me guiltily, “something I should have told you a long time ago.”

  “Jake,” I say nervously, wishing my brother would spare me any more painful truths today.

  He finally meets my gaze with a troubled, but determined look in his eyes. “Remember when you were in the hospital right after your attack in Boston?” he asks hesitantly, but he doesn’t wait for my response before continuing. “They gave you a sedative so that they could run tests and perform the initial surgery on your hand.”

  My left hand automatically clenches in my lap at the memory of the event that changed the course of my life: the attack by two men that left me with a bruised and battered body and my left palm sliced almost completely through with a knife.

  Water builds in Jake’s eyes—the swirling storm of an approaching deluge—before he continues. “You were still unconscious in the recovery room when the tests and the surgery were over and they finally let me see you.”

  He grabs my hands again between us, though maybe just as much for his own support as for mine this time.

  “The doctors told me the surgery went well, but that you might never regain full functionality of your left hand. They gave me the results of the tests, explaining every detail about them and how lucky you were to have no internal bleeding.”

  He stops and takes a deep breath, while I remain frozen in terrifying anticipation of what he has to say.

  “They found something else on the ultrasound, though: a congenital abnormality in the shape of your womb. They told me it might affect your ability to have children.”

  “No,” I whisper, the single word a desperate plea for Jake’s words to be wrong. “No one at the hospital said anything to me about that.”

  Silent tears stream down my brother’s face, but he continues to hold my gaze. “I told them not to talk to you about it. I told them I wanted to be the one to tell you after you left the hospital.”

  My head begins to shake back and forth automatically, my desperate continued effort to deny the words spoken to me. “Why? Why did you never tell me?”

  “You had already lost so much.” His breath catches, and he has to stop for a moment before he can continue to speak. “Your dream of becoming a concert violinist was ripped away from you. I couldn’t burden you with knowing that your hopes for having children someday might have been gone, too.”

  I can’t remain in denial anymore. I can’t will these thoughts and memories away. They only fester inside me, eating away at the strength I’ve built up over the last two and a half years to get past the horrible things that happened to me during my attack, after the collapse of modern society, and even in my early weeks with Silas when he took me from the forest.

  The worst implication of what Jake has just told me suddenly hits me like a bag of bricks to the chest. I had betrayed my brother for nothing. I had burdened his partner with a selfish request that never should have been made and the secret that was left behind as a result of that request. I let someone other than Silas bury himself inside me and fill me with his seed when there was no fertile ground in which it could grow.

  What have I done?

  I’m only just becoming aware of the painful inhalations racking my body and the lightheadedness threatening to consume my mind. Jake’s arms are around me and holding me desperately to him. When his tears are no longer silent, I join him in the expression of pain and guilt, fully knowing that I have committed the greater sin.

  Numbness starts to take over my body and mind, calming my heavy draws of breath and rampant racing thoughts until I’m completely still.

  That single moment of serenity is quickly shattered at the sound of the back door in the kitchen opening and closing. Jake and I pull back from each other just as Silas and Joseph appear down the hallway. The concern on their faces only worsens as they get closer to us.

  “What’s wrong?” Silas demands as he looks between me and Jake. He maneuvers around the coffee table and sits on the other side of me on the couch.

  Joseph looks worried as he steps toward Jake and places his hand hesitantly on Jake’s shoulder. He glances down at me, his eyes searching mine for the answer that he so desperately needs about whether he is going to be a father.

  I can’t direct my response to him, though. I have to give it to the person who is supposed to be the anxious man awaiting this answer, the man who was willing to do whatever was necessary to help me get pregnant.

  I close my eyes and turn to Silas, only daring to open them when Silas has connected his hands to mine. He sweeps his thumb gently across my skin to give me all of the support he knows I need right now.

  “I’m not pregnant,” I inform him quietly. “It’s me. I’m the reason we can’t conceive.”

  Silas stares at me with confusion. “How can you know that?”

  “Jake just told me. Right after my attack in Boston—” I begin to say, but stop to inhale a shaky breath. “The doctors found an abnormality during my scans. It would explain why I haven’t become pregnant.”

  Silas stands up with fury, his enraged eyes immediately finding Jake on the other side of me. “You kept this from her this whole time?” he bellows. “You didn’t think she deserved to know?”

  “Silas!” I cry out, standing up to grab him by the shoulders to calm him down. “He thought he was doing what was best.”

  I glance over my shoulder to check on Jake who is still sitting on the couch. He
looks absolutely defeated as he says, “I thought about telling you before, back when you both first brought up the idea to grow our family.” He stands up to meet our gazes more directly. “But I didn’t tell you because I didn’t think there was any harm in letting you try to make a baby.”

  My eyes inevitably find Joseph’s where he’s standing right behind my brother. I’m devastated to see that none of this has brought him relief. He looks just as troubled as before—if not more so now—and in the end, it feels like my desire to be a mother has destroyed us all.

  “It’s okay,” I say quietly, not just to Jake, but to all three of the men around me who make up my family. “We shouldn’t fight over something that can’t be changed. I don’t want to ruin Joseph’s birthday any more than I already have.” Joseph looks ready to disagree with my last statement, but I don’t give him the chance to argue with me. “Let’s go have dinner.”

  I motion them toward the kitchen, overpowering their reluctance to move on from this conversation by giving them the best facade of strength I can muster. Internally, I know this is nothing more than a ruse on my part. I’m only putting off having to deal with the thoughts and feelings that I know will consume me when I finally face them.

  The four of us quietly move out of the living room and down the hall into the kitchen. While each of the guys makes their way out of the back door toward the patio, I stop briefly at the black drink cart next to the tall cabinet and take what I need most right now: the first bottle of liquor I see in our diminishing supply. It will help me push away my troubled thoughts and focus on the celebration ahead.

  When I step outside to join my family, I see Silas stopped ahead. He’s halfway to the patio and watching me. The bottle in my hand clearly doesn’t go unnoticed as he gives me a look of admonishment mixed with understanding.

  In the two years that I’ve been with Silas, I’ve become more adept at reading his expressions and feelings. I can tell he’s struggling with this development in our relationship just as much as I am, but I know we’ll get through this together. Tonight, when it’s just me and Silas alone in our bed, we’ll find a way past this. We’ll fend off the impending darkness and continue to strive toward the light.