Free Always and Forever by Soraya Lane

when he was trying so hard.
    “You okay?” Savvy asked, putting her hand on Lisa’s shoulder.
    “Yeah, fine,” Lisa said, pushing her thoughts away, looking at the skirt she’d dropped in the window. “Let’s get back to making these ladies look fab.”
    Savvy didn’t look convinced, but she didn’t ask any more questions and Lisa wasn’t about to bring the topic up again. She’d see Matt soon; right now she had work to do, and work was exactly what she needed.

8.
    TWELVE WEEKS LATER
    L isa braved a smile and stared into her champagne glass, raising it slowly to her lips to take a sip. The last thing she felt like was celebrating or drinking, but the other option was to give up and sob on her bed. She straightened her shoulders and smiled at her husband, trying hard to make an effort for his sake.
    Hell, he deserved a medal for putting up with her. There was nothing she could do to pull herself out of the way she was with him, but he was trying and she needed to acknowledge that, even if it was easier to say than do. The only place she still felt like herself anymore was at work, but she couldn’t exactly hide there twenty-four-seven.
    “Happy birth day, Bump,” Matt said.
    Lisa blinked away a fresh flood of tears and nodded. “Happy birth day.” She ran a hand over her stomach, something she’d never stopped doing even when the roundness had long since disappeared.
    She swallowed the emotion and raised her glass again. After going sugar-, dairy- and gluten-free immediately after her cancer diagnosis, she knew she needed to make the most of the delicious bubbles now that she was easing up on her diet restrictions. “We should have been making a mad dash to the hospital today.” Lisa forced herself to push the words out. They hadn’t talked about him for weeks now, but today, not acknowledging him would have only made it harder.
    Matt’s smile was slow. “I bet you’d have been waddling around in bare feet, praying he would get a hurry on.”
    Lisa swilled the champagne again, held the stem so tight she almost hoped the glass would shatter. Their little boy. Their darling, sweet little baby boy.
    “Do you ever wish we hadn’t found out?”
    She nodded. “Yeah. All the time.”
    “It made the whole thing more real,” Matt said, surprising her with his tenderness. “Thinking about what . . .”
    Lisa met his gaze. “Our son would be like?” she answered for him. “Maybe just thinking of him as an it would have made it easier. We wouldn’t have built up such an idea of what he would have been like.”
    They didn’t often talk about what they’d lost, because she always shut down whenever she thought about it. But today was the day they were supposed to have become parents. That she was supposed to have been staying strong and refusing an epidural, learning to breastfeed and refusing formula. Although after everything she’d endured now, she’d happily take the drugs and make up a bottle if it meant being a mom; all the preconceptions she’d held about motherhood were long gone. She just wanted the opportunity, wanted the chance to actually hold her own baby and decide what was best for him.
    Instead, they had an empty nursery filled with even emptier cans of paint. Soft blue walls perfectly finished, a white sleigh crib pushed to one side, the big comfy armchair she’d found at a market never to be used for sitting with a baby. A delicate mobile forlorn on the floor where she’d been trying to assemble it. And still she couldn’t bear to go in there and take it all away.
    “What are we going to do?” Lisa asked, not wanting to pretend any longer that everything was going to be okay when it wasn’t. Nothing about their life was going to plan; nothing felt right.
    Matt leaned over and gave her that big, gorgeous smile that had made her fall for him over a decade earlier as a crazy-in-love sixteen-year-old. His fingers over her palm had always soothed her, made her so thankful to have