Page 74 of Make Room for Love
From her vantage point on the ground, this now seemed like a very good question.I’m fine, Isabel tried to yell. It came out as a garbled cry.
There was jostling above her. The EMTs were trying to get Mira to back off. “Let me ride in the ambulance,” Mira said.
More commotion. “Ma’am?—”
“That’s my wife.” Mira’s voice cut through everyone else’s. Isabel let out a laugh despite everything. Pain shot up her wrist, and she winced and gritted her teeth. “I need to go with her,” Mira said. Her tone was even, but she left no room for disagreement. “She needs me.”
Somehow, Mira got past the EMTs, and then she was right above Isabel. Mira was an angel. But the wild anguish on her face was unbearable to see. An EMT said, “Is this woman?—”
“Yeah,” Isabel gasped out. She went limp and let the EMTs take her into the ambulance.
“If you’reangry with me, you can tell me,” Isabel said.
They were still in the hospital at midnight. Mira had stayed with her during the entire agonizing wait in the ER. They were waiting for the final sign-off from the doctor, and Isabel had enough painkillers in her that she could talk.
All night long, she’d sensed the walls closing in on her. If Mira hadn’t been by her side, she didn’t know how she would have made it.
“I am,” Mira said. She looked exhausted, hunched over in the chair next to Isabel’s hospital bed.
“I’m sorry.” The guilt was killing Isabel. “I’m wasting so much of your time.”
Mira sat up. “Oh, that’s not why I’m angry.” She sounded like her patience had finally run out. Maybe this was it, the moment Isabel had been fearing all these months. “I’m notangry because you’re injured and you need help. I don’t want to hear you apologize for that ever again. I’m angry because you did something reckless and endangered yourself, right after you got hurt at work yesterday and refused to tell me anything about it. And I’m angry because over the last few weeks, you’ve been upset about something and taking it out on me, and you won’t admit it or tell me what’s wrong. It makes me feel awful.”
Isabel’s stomach sank through the floor. Was that really how Mira saw it, that Isabel had been taking something out on her? “I don’t know why you’ve been acting like this,” Mira continued. “I wish I knew, and I wish I could help you. I don’t know what else to do.”
Even now, Mira’s expression was full of concern. Isabel closed her eyes and shut out the terrible sterile room. Then she forced herself to look at Mira again, even as her shame overwhelmed her.
“You’re right.” She rubbed her face with her good hand. “I’m sorry. I don’t even know where to start. It’s been an awful last few weeks for me. It has nothing to do with you. There’s a lot I probably should have told you.”
“Like what?”
Mira wanted to know, and it hurt her to not know, and Isabel wasn’t going to hold on to Mira by hiding things from her. It was humiliating how clear this was in retrospect, after Isabel had put herself in the hospital. “The fight I had with Grace was really bad. I didn’t tell you all of it.”
“From a month ago?”
Isabel nodded. “I told her that I was worried about Kevin being a good partner.”
“I remember.”
“That wasn’t the end of it. I said that to her…” This was excruciating. But she had to do it for Mira. “I said that to her, and she said to me, ‘A good partner? You would know all aboutthat, right?’” Isabel remembered each and every word. “And I walked out on her. I couldn’t even say anything. It hurt so much. I’ve been really fucked up over it ever since. I’m not blaming her. Just me.”
“Oh, Isabel,” Mira said, sympathetic to a fault as ever. “That’s a cruel thing to say. Whatever else you might have said, that’s not fair to you.”
A wave of anger washed over Isabel. Anger at herself, pulling her under. “It is fair.”
Mira reached out and squeezed her good hand, and it was a lifeline as she was drowning. “It’s not. You know you don’t have to blame yourself for everything, right?”
Isabel took a shaky breath. If she let herself believe that, her entire world would fall apart. She had responsibilities, no matter how much she was failing to meet them.
“Was she talking about us?” Mira asked.
Isabel shook her head. “I didn’t tell her about you. I think she was talking about Reina breaking up with me.”
Mira was silent. Her expression shifted. Finally, she said, with quiet determination, “I know this is beside the point. And I know it’s only been a few months. But I hope I’m not a secret you’re keeping from your family.”
“No,” Isabel said, horrified. Once again, she wanted to track down and fight all of Mira’s bad exes. But maybe she was about to become yet another one of them. “No.Oh, god, Mira, I promise you I’m not. I might have fucked up everything else, but I promise I’m not doing that. Being with you is the best thing that’s ever happened to me. And I want everyone to know. I told my parents about how much you mean to me. I want my whole family to meet you.” She sniffled. “It hurts so much that I’ll never introduce you to Alexa and she’ll never get to see how much I love you.”
Mira wasn’t supposed to know any of this. But Isabel was crumbling, and everything she’d tried to hold back was rushing out in a torrent. She took her hand out of Mira’s grasp and wiped her face, not even bothering to hide her tears. “I didn’t tell Grace because I wanted to save it for when we made up. And because being with you was the best part of my life, and I thought I could keep it separate from all my mistakes with Grace. I don’t know what I was trying to do. Whatever it was, I didn’t do it right.”