God & Sinner

7. Things that Can Never Be Replaced

No. I didn't want to go. Or maybe I did. None of it felt right, but I kept my eyes down and followed quietly behind Kayla, knowing that she held all the power in this moment. I hated her a little for that. We all had to find ways of managing, right? Still, the building loomed closer, and even though we were outside it was like I could hear them all judging us already. They had no right—they had no idea what we'd been through. But hadn't they all been through the same thing? Wasn't that the purpose of our coming together like this? No, I didn't want to go. Stepping foot inside would make it all real, and I didn't think I could live if it was real, so I reached out and stopped her.

Yet it wasn't me. It was Luke Dalton, and he grabbed his wife to catch her before she could take another step.

"Let's not do this, let's go home." He implored, a vulnerability in his tone.

"You're the one who wanted to come here. Get your shit together." She was calloused when she pulled away, the same as she'd been since it happened. He thought maybe she blamed him. She did. There was nothing he could do to change that—especially when he knew he blamed her too. That was the tragedy of the cycle they'd fallen into, that even though they should've turned to one another for comfort, their blame kept them apart. He was lonely without a hand to hold, so yes, he had sought out support—anything to stave off the empty feeling that tore at his guts.

At first it wasn't so bad when they were inside, and they just sat in the back while trying their best not to interrupt the obviously emotional woman who was speaking. Yet then she finished, and the coordinator was preaching at the pulpit, and he called them out, drawing all the eyes in the room to them. Kayla was silent, leaving him to fend for himself. He should've been used to it by then. Even though he wasn't, he stuttered through the introduction, glad when the next grieving parent stole the spotlight and began to talk about the child that had been lost.

That was what this meeting was. Support. A support group for parents who had lost their children. It broke his heart to understand the realness of that statement; that he was actually one of those parents now. It seemed like a nightmare, like something people only saw on TV but never really happened. Yet it had happened, to him and to all the others in the room. It was a pain that no parent should have to know, but that didn't change things, and he looked over to his wife and missed her. They'd been in love before. Now, well, he wondered if they could survive it.

One after another the parents went, sharing stories of their kids, their lives after, their pain. It hurt to hear, and he wished he had never come. Kayla wore a smirk beside him, even though he could see that it deeply affected her to be there. His heart pounded again when he was asked if he wanted to speak, and he gave them a hurried answer so that they'd move on. The meeting didn't last too terribly long, but it felt like a lifetime. Yet that wasn't something he should've taken for granted, he realized. At least he had a lifetime.

"Your first time here?" A voice sounded behind him as he stood at the snack table. That was where he'd wandered after everything had finished. No one had seemed to pay him any mind—and he wondered if it was because they'd seen his son on the news. Maybe they wanted to give him space. Or maybe they hated to be reminded of the things that had been taken from them as well. But this voice was different, and it approached him, emboldened. "I haven't seen you before, I mean."

"We were just checking it out, my wife and I," he gave a basic answer as he pointed to Kayla, who stood on the other side of the room talking to someone else. Surely she avoided the subject everyone was there for, though. She was selfish that way, and he didn't want to think about her right then, so he focused on the woman who gave him a smile. "But I don't think it's really for us."