All Your Perfects

by Colleen Hoover

  But right now, our house is silent. And that silence between us is so loud; I don’t think I’ll ever be able to fall asleep.

  We’ve tried therapy in the past, hoping it would help with the infertility issues we struggled with. I got bored with it. He got bored with it. And then we bonded over how boring therapy was. Therapists do nothing but try to make you recognize the wrongs within yourself. That’s not Graham’s issue and it’s not my issue. We know our faults. We recognize them. My fault is that I can’t have a baby and it makes me sad. Graham’s fault is that he can’t fix me and it makes him sad. There’s no magical cure that therapy will bring us. No matter how much we spend on trying to fix our issue, no therapist in the world can get me pregnant. Therefore, therapy is just a drain on a bank account that has already had one too many leaks.

  Maybe the only cure for us is divorce. It’s weird, having thoughts of divorcing someone I’m in love with. But I think about it a lot. I think about how much time Graham is wasting by being with me. He would be sad if I left him, but he’d meet someone new. He’s too good not to. He’d fall in love and he could make a baby and he’d be able to rejoin that circle of life that I ripped him out of. When I think about Graham being a father someday, it always makes me smile . . . even if the thought of him being a father doesn’t include me being a mother.

  I think the only reason I never completely let him go is because of the miracles. I read the articles and the books and the blog posts from the mothers who tried to conceive for years and then just as they were about to give up, voilà! Pregnant!

  The miracles gave me hope. Enough hope to hang on to Graham just enough in case we ever got a miracle of our own. Maybe that miracle would have fixed us. Put a Band-Aid on our broken marriage.

  I want to hate him for kissing someone else. But I can’t, because part of me doesn’t blame him. I’ve been giving him every excuse in the world to walk out on me. We haven’t had sex in a while, but I know that’s not why he strayed outside of our marriage. Graham would go a lifetime without sex if I needed him to.

  The reason he allowed himself to fuck up is because he gave up on us.

  Back when I was in college, I was assigned to do an article on a couple who had been married for sixty years. They were both in their eighties. When I showed up to the interview, I was shocked at how in tune they were with each other. I assumed, after living with someone for sixty years, you’d be sick of them. But they looked at each other like they still somehow respected and admired each other, even after all they’d been through.

  I asked them a number of questions during the interview, but the question I ended the interview with left such an impact on me. I asked, “What’s the secret to such a perfect marriage?”

  The old man leaned forward and looked at me very seriously. “Our marriage hasn’t been perfect. No marriage is perfect. There were times when she gave up on us. There were even more times when I gave up on us. The secret to our longevity is that we never gave up at the same time.”

  I’ll never forget the honesty in that man’s answer.

  And now I truly feel like I’m living that. I believe that’s why Graham did what he did. Because he finally gave up on us. He’s not a superhero. He’s human. There isn’t a person in this world who could put up with being shut out for as long as Graham has put up with it. He has been our strength in the past and I’ve continually been our weakest link. But now the tables have turned and Graham was momentarily our weakest link.

  The problem is—I feel like I’ve given up, too. I feel like we’ve both given up at the same time and there may be no turning back from that. I know I could fix it by forgiving him and telling him I’ll try harder, but part of me wonders if that’s the right choice.

  Why fight for something that will likely never get better? How long can a couple cling to a past they both prefer in order to justify a present where neither of them is happy?

  There is no doubt in my mind that Graham and I used to be perfect for each other. But just because we used to be perfect for each other doesn’t mean we’re perfect together now. We’re far from it.

  I look at the clock, wishing it would magically fast forward through tomorrow. I have a feeling tomorrow is going to be so much worse than today was. Because tomorrow I feel like we’ll be forced to make a decision.

  We’ll have to decide if it’s finally time to open that wooden box.

  The thought of it makes my stomach turn. A pain rips through me and I clench at my shirt as I lean forward. I am so heartbroken; I can actually physically feel it. But I don’t cry, because in this situation, my tears cause me even more pain.

  I walk to our bedroom with dry eyes. It’s the longest stretch of time I’ve gone in the last twenty-four hours without crying. I push open our bedroom door, expecting Graham to be asleep. Instead, he’s sitting up against the headboard. His reading glasses are at the tip of his nose and he’s holding a book in his lap. His bedside lamp is on and we make eye contact for a brief second.

  I crawl in bed beside him, my back turned to him. I think we’re both too broken tonight to even continue the argument. He continues reading his book and I do my best to try to fall asleep. My mind runs, though. Several minutes pass and just knowing he’s right next to me prevents me from relaxing. He must realize I’m still awake because I hear him as he closes his book and places it on the nightstand. “I quit my job today.”

  I don’t say anything in response to his confession. I just stare at the wall.

  “I know you think I left for work this morning and that I just left you here, locked up in this bedroom.”

  He’s right. That’s exactly what I thought.

  “But I only left the house because I needed to quit my job. I can’t work in the place where I made the worst mistake of my life. I’ll start looking for a new job next week.”

  I squeeze my eyes shut and pull the covers up to my chin. He turns out the lamp, indicating he doesn’t need a response from me. After he rolls over, I let out a quiet sigh, knowing he won’t be working around Andrea anymore. He stopped giving up. He’s trying again. He still believes there’s a possibility that our marriage will go back to how it used to be.

  I feel sorry for him. What if he’s wrong?

  These thoughts plague me for the next hour. Graham somehow falls asleep—or I think he’s asleep. He’s playing the part well.

  But I can’t sleep. The tears keep threatening to fall and the pain in my stomach gets worse and worse. I get up and take some aspirin, but when I’m back in the bed I start to question whether emotional turmoil can actually manifest as physical pain.

  Something isn’t right.

  It shouldn’t hurt this much.

  I feel a sharp pain. A deep pain. A pain strong enough to force me onto my side. I clench my fists around my blanket and curl my legs up to my stomach. When I do this, I feel it. Slippery and wet, all over the sheets.

  “Graham.” I try to reach for him, but he’s rolling over to turn on the light. Another pain, so profound it makes me gasp for breath.

  “Quinn?”

  His hand is on my shoulder. He pulls the covers away. Whatever he sees sends him flying off the bed, the lights are on, he’s picking me up, telling me it’ll be okay, he’s carrying me, we’re in the car, he’s speeding, I’m sweating, I look down, I’m covered in blood. “Graham.”

  I’m terrified and he takes my hand and he squeezes it and he says, “It’s okay, Quinn. We’re almost there. We’re almost there.”

  Everything after that runs together.

  There are glimpses of things that stick out to me. The fluorescent light over my head. Graham’s hand around mine. Words I don’t want to hear, like, miscarriage and hemorrhaging and surgery.

  Words Graham is saying into the phone, probably to his mother, while he holds my hand. He whispers them because he thinks I might be asleep. Part of me is, most of me isn’t. I know these aren’t things he’s saying might happen. They’ve already happened. I’m not going
into surgery. I’ve just come out of it.

  Graham ends the call. His lips are against my forehead and he whispers my name. “Quinn?” I open my eyes to meet his. His eyes are red and there’s a deep wrinkle between his brows that I’ve never noticed before. It’s new, probably brought on by what’s currently happening. I wonder if I’ll think of this moment every time I look at that wrinkle.

  “What happened?”

  The crease between his eyes deepens. He brushes his hand over my hair and carefully releases his words. “You had a miscarriage last night,” he confirms. His eyes search mine, preparing for whatever reaction I might have.

  It’s weird that my body doesn’t feel it. I know I’m probably heavily medicated, but it seems like I would know that there was a life growing inside of me that is no longer there. I put a hand on my stomach, wondering how I missed it. How long had I been pregnant? How long has it been since we last had sex? Over two months. Closer to three.

  “Graham,” I whisper. He takes my hand and squeezes it. I know I should be full of so much devastation right now that not even a sliver of happiness or relief could find its way into my soul. But somehow, I don’t feel the devastation that should accompany this moment. I feel hope. “I was pregnant? We finally got pregnant?”

  I don’t know how I’m focusing on the only positive thing about this entire situation, but after years of constant failure, I can’t help but take this as a sign. I got pregnant. We had a partial miracle.

  A tear slips out of Graham’s eye and lands on my arm. I look down at the tear and watch it slide over my skin. My eyes flick back up to Graham’s and not a single part of him is able to see the positive in this situation.

  “Quinn . . .”

  Another tear falls from his eye. In all the years I’ve known him, I’ve never seen him look this sad. I shake my head, because whatever has him this terrified to speak is not something I want to hear.

  Graham squeezes my hand again and looks at me with so much devastation in his eyes, I have to turn away from him when he speaks. “When we got here last night . . .”

  I try to stop listening, but my ears refuse to fail me.

  “You were hemorrhaging.”

  The word no is repeating and I have no idea if it’s coming from my mouth or if it’s inside my head.

  “You had to have a . . .”

  I curl up and hug my knees, squeezing my eyes shut. As soon as I hear the word hysterectomy I start crying. Sobbing.

  Graham crawls into the hospital bed and wraps himself around me, holding me as we let go of every single ounce of hope that was left between us.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  * * *

  Then

  It’s our last night at the beach house. We leave in the morning to head back to Connecticut. Graham has a meeting he has to be back for tomorrow afternoon. I have laundry to do before I go back to work on Tuesday. Neither of us is ready to leave yet. It’s been peaceful and perfect and I’m already looking forward to coming back here with him. I don’t even care if I have to kiss my mother’s ass for the next month in order to plan our next getaway. It’s a price I’ll gladly pay for another weekend of perfection.

  It’s a little bit colder tonight than the last two nights we’ve been here, but I kind of like it. I have the heater turned up high in the house. We freeze our asses off for hours near the fire pit and then cuddle up in bed to thaw out. It’s a routine I would never get bored of.

  I just finished making us both cups of hot chocolate. I take them outside and hand Graham his, then sit down next to him.

  “Okay,” he says. “Next question.”

  Graham found out this morning that, even though I love looking at it, I’ve never actually stepped foot in the ocean. He spent the majority of the day trying to figure out other things about me that he didn’t know. It’s become a game to us now and we’re alternating questions so we can find out everything there is to know about each other.

  He mentioned the first night we were together that he doesn’t talk about religion or politics. But it’s been six months now and I’m curious to know his opinions. “We’ve still never discussed religion,” I say. “Or politics. Are those still topics that are off the table?”

  Graham edges the cup with his lips and sucks a marshmallow into his mouth. “What do you want to know?”

  “Are you a Republican or a Democrat?”

  He doesn’t even hesitate. “Neither. I can’t stand the extremists on either side, so I sort of hover in the middle.”

  “So you’re one of those people.”

  He tilts his head. “What people?”

  “The kind who pretend to agree with every opinion just to keep the peace.”

  Graham arches an eyebrow. “Oh, I have opinions, Quinn. Strong ones.”

  I pull my legs up and tuck them under me, facing him. “I want to hear them.”

  “What do you want to know?”

  “Everything,” I challenge. “Your stance on gun control. Immigration. Abortion. All of it.”

  I love the look of excitement on his face, as if he’s preparing for a presentation. It’s adorable that a presentation would even excite him.

  He sets his mug of hot chocolate on the table beside him. “Okay . . . let’s see. I don’t think we should take away a citizen’s right to own a gun. But I do think it should be one hell of a difficult process to get your hands on one. I think women should decide what to do with their own bodies, as long as it’s within the first trimester or it’s a medical emergency. I think government programs are absolutely necessary but I also think a more systematic process needs to be put in place that would encourage people to get off of welfare, rather than to stay on it. I think we should open up our borders to immigrants, as long as they register and pay taxes. I’m certain that life-saving medical care should be a basic human right, not a luxury only the wealthy can afford. I think college tuition should automatically be deferred and then repaid over a twenty-year period on a sliding scale. I think athletes are paid way too much, teachers are paid way too little, NASA is underfunded, weed should be legal, people should love who they want to love, and Wi-Fi should be universally accessible and free.” When he’s finished, he calmly reaches for his mug of hot chocolate and brings it back to his mouth. “Do you still love me?”

  “More than I did two minutes ago.” I press a kiss to his shoulder and he wraps his arm around me, tucking me against him.

  “Well, that went better than I thought it would.”

  “Don’t get too comfortable,” I warn. “We still haven’t discussed religion. Do you believe in God?”

  Graham breaks eye contact and looks out at the ocean. He caresses my shoulder and thinks about my question for a moment. “I didn’t used to.”

  “But you do now?”

  “Yeah. I do now.”

  “What changed your mind?”

  “A few things,” he says. He nudges his head toward the ocean. “That being one of them. How can something exist that is that magnificent and powerful without something even more magnificent and powerful creating it?”

  I stare out at the water with him when he asks me what I believe. I shrug. “Religion isn’t one of my mother’s strong suits, but I’ve always believed there was something out there greater than us. I just don’t know exactly what it is. I don’t think anyone knows for sure.”

  “That’s why they call it faith,” he says.

  “So how does a man of math and science reconcile his knowledge with his faith?”

  Graham smiles when I ask him that question, like he’s been dying to discuss it. I love that about him. He has this adorable inner nerd that appears sometimes and it makes him even more attractive.

  “Do you know how old the earth is, Quinn?”

  “No, but I bet I’m about to find out.”

  “Four and a half billion years old,” he says. His voice is full of wonder, like this is his absolute favorite thing to talk about. “Do you know how long ago our specific
species appeared?”

  “No idea.”

  “Only two hundred thousand years ago,” he says. “Only two hundred thousand years out of four and a half billion years. It’s unbelievable.” He grabs my hand and lays it palm down on his thigh. He begins tracing over the back of my hand with a lazy finger. “If the back of your hand represented the age of this earth and every species that has ever lived, the entire human race wouldn’t even be visible to the naked eye. We are that insignificant.” He drags his fingers to the center of the back of my hand and points to a small freckle. “From the beginning of time until now, we could combine every single human that has ever walked this earth, and all their problems and concerns as a whole wouldn’t even amount to the size of this freckle right here.” He taps my hand. “Every single one of your life experiences could fit right here in this tiny freckle. So would mine. So would Beyoncé’s.”

  I laugh.

  “When you look at the earth’s existence as a whole, we’re nothing. We haven’t even been here long enough to earn bragging rights. Yet humans believe we’re the center of the universe. We focus on the stupidest, most mundane issues. We stress about things that mean absolutely nothing to the universe, when we should be nothing but grateful that evolution even gave our species a chance to have problems. Because one of these days . . . humans won’t exist. History will repeat itself and earth will move on to a different species altogether. Me and you . . . we’re just two people out of an entire race that, in retrospect, is still way less impressive at sustainability than a dinosaur. We just haven’t reached our expiration date yet.” He slides his fingers through mine and squeezes my hand.

  “Based on all the scientific evidence that proves how insignificant we are, it was always hard for me to believe in God. The more appropriate question would have been, ‘Could a God believe in me?’ Because a lot has happened on this earth in four and a half billion years to think that a God would give a shit about me or my problems. But, I recently concluded that there’s no other explanation for how you and I could end up on the same planet, in the same species, in the same century, in the same country, in the same state, in the same town, in the same hallway, in front of the same door for the same reason at the exact same time. If God didn’t believe in me, then I’d have to believe you were just a coincidence. And you being a coincidence in my life is a lot harder for me to fathom than the mere existence of a higher power.”