It was the coldness that woke me, I decided. The coldness in my heart. The coldness of today's earlier rejection. The coldness in the bed, Dan's usual comforting warmness gone. For a split second in my half asleep delirium I wondered if simply he was as cold inside as I was and that was perhaps why he'd lost his external warmth, but a moment later and a few steps closer to consciousness I realised it was actually because he wasn't in bed with me at all.
'Dan?' I called out, voice wavering as I was still shaking from the emotional trauma. It was a wonder I'd been able to fall asleep at all considering the last thing I remembered was sobbing myself sick into Dan's chest, feeling like I was about to throw up. The memory of her face floated past my mind's eye for about the thousandth time, if it had ever left at all, her words echoing so loudly it was as if I was hearing her speak them still.
I'm sorry. I honestly didn't think I'd change my mind, but you can't help what you feel can you? I'm so sorry.
She was right. You couldn't help what you feel, but that hardly made the pain of losing out on an adoption any easier. If anything, all it did was make it more real, more debilitating, more like you were standing right on the edge of a cliff and the force of those words had knocked you right off; now you were just falling and falling and falling and you didn't even know where the ground was, when you would hit rock bottom. You just kept falling as the pain just kept getting worse. We'd been so close, but not close enough. Not close enough for a signature to seal the deal.
Instead, we'd been left in the void and now, alone, I didn't know what I could hang onto anymore to keep me tethered to reality.
'Dan?' I cried out once more, the sound hollow, empty, cracking under the desperation of the emotion it concealed. I needed him with me right now but he didn't come running. Instead, I was forced to listen out into the haunting silence that followed my voice for any hint at all as to where reality lay. The answer came in the form of a subdued sob, transmitted through walls but the anguish no less recognizable.
Bleary eyed, beyond simply emotionally spent, I felt like nothing more than a ghost, a carved out echo of my former self as I walked from the bed towards the door, into the hallway, the room at the end beckoning me cruelly. No longer was this life filled with hope and things to cherish and adore; it was only bleak, grey as the midnight shadows cast eerily along the walls, an existence as tortured as the pained wails coming from the nursery at the end of the hall.
'Dan?' I asked one last time as I trudged into the mockingly brightly painted room, gaze falling to the huddled mess that was my husband sat in the middle of the floor clutching the bright yellow blanket to his chest. When his gaze met mine there was a shared sense of the overwhelming sadness; we'd been in this together from the start, but that made the pain now twice as bad for both of us.
'We were so close Phil. So close.'
We had been so close, but any setback in the process took us right back to square one and there was only so many times that could happen to a person before things really started to take their toll. There was only so much hurt a person could take, and even stronger together wasn't doing us much good now.
'I know.'
The words were soft, swallowed, almost, in the darkness and not comforting in the slightest. Now wasn't the time for comfort; that would have to come later. Now was the time for mourning, a process that only might slowly lead to the acceptance of our position. Only time could tell if three years worth of destroyed hope and unanswered searching leading up to this epic finale of letdown was something that could be recovered from.
For right now, though, in this particular moment, before any more time tried to heal us, the only thing that could be done was to wait. And giving into that I sat down and waited, in the middle of the nursery that earlier this morning we'd expected to lay our son to sleep in, but now was empty save for two broken souls, the promise of three vanquished. So we cried, our very last drop of hope going towards believing tomorrow might be a marginally better day. It was the only thing we had left: that, and each other. The two of us.