By the time I was done, she was hugging me and telling me everything would be okay.
Only after she was sure that I would be fine did she tell me what I knew.
“You have postpartum depression,” she murmured gently.
I swallowed past a hiccup.
“I figured that.”
“It’s not abnormal,” she admitted. “It’s actually a lot more common than you’d think. Lots of women get it after having their children, and it’s something that you can control with medication. And you don’t have to be on that medication forever. It’s usually just a short time thing, so you can get your body back under control hormonally.”
I nodded, still choked up.
She patted my arm and said, “I’ll call this into the pharmacy in town now. But if you need anything, I truly mean anything, you call us. We’ll be available to you.”
My shoulders deflated, and I nodded my head.
She patted my shoulder and said, “You should call your family.”
I probably should.
It wasn’t like this was going to turn into something that was fixable.
In fact, there was only one possible way out of this, and it was breaking up for real.
Fifteen years down the drain.
Fifteen years as a couple.
A child. A shared life. All gone in one morning appointment.
“When you leave here, go get the prescription picked up. Take it. Then I want to have a follow-up with you in one week. I want to hear how it’s going. We may need to adjust the dose.” She stood and squeezed my hand. “There are good men out there. Men that’ll be everything that you could ever want. Trust me when I say, you don’t have to settle for trash.”
With that, the doctor walked out of the room, leaving me and my crying baby behind.
I did what she said.
I went to the pharmacy and filled my prescription.
I also went to a diner and spilled my beans all over again to the waitress that took my order. When she saw how frazzled and distraught I was with Holt, she’d snatched him up and started walking around with him, calming him down better than I ever had.
Any normal mother would’ve likely been hesitant to give her baby to some stranger to walk around with, but I was past that point in my life.
I would take any help that I could get at this point.
That included the woman from the closest diner in town who looked like she was a good person.
While she was walking with Holt, I tried, and failed, to come up with a solution to this shit storm that was swirling around me that would have me keeping the life that I’d thought I once had.
Only, the more that I thought about it, the less that I could see an outcome where I stayed where I was and became happy.
There was no happy ending here.
There was only an ending, and there was nothing happy about it.
Three
And this is why I wanted to stay home. All this shit right here.
