Week 91 – This was hard

A month had passed since Drake had walked out of her hospital room.

She hadn’t seen him since.

Just as she’d asked he hadn’t contacted her in anyway, he had just disappeared.

Again.

In the last month her body had healed from the stab wound, but her mind was still stuck in that same dark place. Her family still worried about her, she still didn’t eat or sleep or leave the house. She just sat, curled up in her rocking chair, and felt betrayed.

Drake hadn’t even fought for her.

Did she want him to?

Rachel wasn’t sure. She was so angry, so hurt that he could let her think that he was dead, and that he could leave her to grieve the loss of their child alone. But as angry and as hurt as she was it didn’t change one simple little fact.

She still loved him.

She hadn’t expected him to give up so easily. She had expected him to teller that he was never letting her go, she had expected him try to winter back, she had expected him sit outside her hospital room and try to convince her to let him drive her home when she was releases, she had expected him to turn up at her door every day, apologising and telling her he loved her.

But maybe he didn’t.

Maybe he didn’t love her the same way that she loved him.

How else could she explain how easily he had walked away from her?

That hurt her more than anything else.

Had she wasted the last few years of her life married to a man who didn’t love her, then grieved for him while he tossed her away like an old, no longer needed, security blanket?

She still had her security blanket. She had taken it with her everywhere she went until she was seven and the taunts of her peers had finally pushed her into giving it up. Although she still had it it had lost he magic it once possessed. Now it was just a dirty, tattered piece of material. Was that how Drake saw her? The old, dirty, tattered, broken wife he had one loved but had now lost its magic?

This was hard.

The hardest thing she had ever had to deal with.

Her doorbell rung and Rachel ignored it. She wasn’t in the mood for another pep talk from her family. She knew they loved her but they didn’t understand. How could they? She didn’t even understand all the emotions swirling around inside her. All she knew was that they were choking her. Bit by bit they were choking the life right out of her.

The doorbell rung again, and then again, and it was only to put a stop to it that she finally dragged herself out of the rocking chair.

When she threw open the door she didn’t find her family but Drake. Well new Drake, same eyes, different face, like he had had plastic surgery to change his appearance. He probably had, so the gang-and maybe her as well-would no longer be able to recognise him.

In his arms Drake held a box of chocolates, and bouquet of flowers. Her favorite flowers. Tulips, in a rainbow of colors.

She wanted to ask what he was doing here but all she could do was stare at him, her mouth hanging open in shock. He was staring at her too like he never wanted to look at anything else but was fully prepared for the door to be slammed in his face.

“Dinner?” he finally asked. “Not as husband and wife, just a date, a chance to start over, please, Rach.”