Disclaimer: I own nothing except my imagination and the kids names.
a/n: I want to thank each and everyone who left a review for last chapter (or those who read but didn't) as well as people on Twitter who give me their review directly on there (JustPinky4, Gisi151, lanterin and ZoellnerEmily). I also want to thank the people who favourite and follow the story.
Now it's time for Gabby and Matt to come clean about their past so it can help them heal and move on.
Matt and Gabby stayed silent for a few minutes before Matt felt the need to talk.
"I'm here if you want to talk about it." It wasn't the first time he was offering an ear to listen but he didn't want her to feel pressured to talk about it. Matt looked at her, trying to read where her head was at but failed. Her body was still and she was still looking at the horizon.
"I'm sorry I lied to you." She finally turned and looked at Matt, her eyes gleaming with tears.
"You have nothing to be sorry about Gabby." He assured her.
"I do. I lied to you from the moment we met at the school and that's not fair to you." I took a tiny leap of faith and pressed a thumb to her cheek, wiping the tear that was falling from her eye.
"I know what it feels like to have your heart break in tiny pieces and wonder if you'll ever feel complete again. You're heart is only trying to protect you from more pain, I get that." There was hidden meaning behind those words, Gabby just didn't know it.
"Why does it hurt so much?"
"To remind us what it feels like to be loved, to love someone so unconditionally that it hurts." Matt still felt the pain Hallie left in his heart the day she left him and the girls. "How about I take you home?" Gabby nodded, offering no objection. He helped her get up and they walked to his truck, Matt's arm drapped around her shoulder and hers around his waist, silence filling those moments. The walk to his truck was short and he held out his hand for her to take so she could lift herself up before he closed the door. Gabby kept looking out of the window, showing off a blurry Chicago, her mind reminding her of the pain her heart was feeling. Matt's hand curled around hers that was sitting on her lap, squeezing it to let her know he was there for her. He went with her up the stairs of her building to make sure that she mad it back safely but he wasn't expencting her next move.
"Do you want to come in for some coffee?" she leaned against her half open door, giving him a shy smile.
"Sure." She opened the door a little more to let him inside her appartment. "Nice place."
"Thank you." She closed the door and walked towards her kitchen to fix them some coffee, both were leaning against a different side of her counter, more silence filling the space between them. "I had a great time tonight." The silence finally getting too much for her.
"I'm glad you enjoyed it. It's always good to spend some time without the kids, helps keep your mind clear."
"Yeah. I haven't had time to do that before I moved back here." She guided him towards the living room and invited him to sit down on the couch. She was trying to keep her emotions in check, her mind not letting her be there with Matt. Matt noticed her far away look, sensing she was struggling with the fact that she told him the truth about her husband.
"I know I've said it a lot but you can talk to me." she sat against the arm of her couch, raising her legs up, resting her cup of coffee on her knees.
"I moved there when I met him." She started. It wasn't easy to talk about it and Shay had been the only one outside the Dawson family to know anything about her recent past. Matt didn't pressure her to say anything, wanting her to tell him what she was comfortable reveiling. "We were on vacation in the Domonican Republic, visiting family there when I met him and I moved there to be with him."
"It must have been hard for you to move back here with the kids." He said softly. bringing his legs up as well, wrapping his arms around them, his coffee cup long forgotten on the table next to them.
"The harder part was living with the memories. Every room in the house, every favourite shop, every date. I was slowly dying there." Tears were running down her cheeks, her thumbs franticly crushing them away.
"What you did took a lot of guts."
"I ran away Matt." The sadness turned into anger, anger at the whole situation, something she hadn't let herself feel until now. "My husband died of cancer ten months after he was diagnosed and I ran away Matt. What kind of person does that?" Matt finally moved closer to her and pulled her in his arms.
"You're not a bad person Gabby. You had three kids to think about, they needed you and you did what you had to do." He felt her body start to shake against his, all her built up emotion spilling out. She needed to let herself feel and grieve like she hadn't let herself do for the sake of her kids. He held her until her shaking subsided. He pulled her with him so they were lying down, Gabby safely tucked into him, facing him. There was nothing sexual or intimate in the gesture, only friends having each other's backs. "And your family has your back." He moved a strand of hair away from her eyes.
"I don't know what I would have done without them. Antonio gave me a place to stay until I could find my own, I'll never be grateful enough for that."
"And from what I saw, he'd do it all over again."
"I know. He was always protective of me."
"I'm glad he is." Their voices were soft and low. "Tell me about your husband." It wasn't a request meant to make her uncomfortable or recoil, he just wanted her to let her feelings out.
"His name was Alberto, Alberto Ramirez." She started. Everything made so much more sense to him now. "He owned his own construction business there, even before we met. We bought a house about six months after meeting for the first time."
"How did your family feel about it? Did they think you were moving too fast?"
"Antonio thought I was out of my mind." She chuckled lightly, the vibrations sending tingles through his own body.
"And were you?"
"I don't think so. He was kind to everyone and loving. When I told him I was pregnant the first time, I had never seen him more happy. And when I gave birth to the twins, it was the first time I saw him crying."
"I know the feeling. When the girls were born, it was like life suddenly had a real purpose, they were perfect."
"The long hours of labour were worth it."
"And what about Valentina? She must have been a little daddy's girl." He could imagine the little girl bouncing around in the house, her dad wrapped around her little finger.
"He always said that he wanted to have a little girl that looked like her mother. He would always say that we would be in trouble once she had grown older and that boys would start chasing after her. I just didn't imagine it would all be taken away so quickly." She was playing with invisible lint on Matt's shirt.
"When? What?" Matt really didn't know how to ask his next question, his speech was a little bit stuttered.
"When Valentina was about five months old, he complained of pain in the abdomen and we took him to the hospital and they did some tests. It was lung cancer and it had metastasised, they gave him a year to live."
"I can't even imagine what that was like. How did you tell the kids?"
"We told them that daddy was really sick. We tried to prepare them as much as we could but they were small, I don't know how much they remember."
"Kids are tough."
"More than I am." She whispered.
"You are tough Gabriella Dawson. Don't ever doubt that."
"And what about you? What happened to your ex?" She looked up in his eyes, looking to take the conversation away from herself a little bit.
"It's not important, it seems so stupid compared." He started but she stopped him.
"It's not stupid. We all face different obstacles but neither one is stupid more than the other."
"Her name was Hallie Thomas. She was a resident at Lakeshore when we met and I asked her to marry me after a year. Things were going really well and we were even planning the wedding when she came home one evening after her shift, tears streaming down her cheeks."
"What happened?"
"We hadn't talked about kids yet. She was pregnant and had just found out. The pregnancy came with it's normal complications: Nausea,vomitting and mood swings. She had an easy delivery, only took four hours and the girls were born."
"How did it feel?"
"I had never felt anything quite like it. They were so beautiful and they needed to be protected. I never felt so complete right then, when they were placed in my arms. I had everything I ever wanted, a family."
"What happened?" This was the question that made Matt relive all the pain that had come with the blessing of having his twin daughters.
"She suffered from post partum depression. We had never talked about kids before we found out she was pregnant but she wasn't sure if she ever wanted kids. She put on a happy face for me because she knew I was over the moon with the news."
"I'm sorry." She said sincerely
"Thanks. One day, I came home from shift and the babysitter was there. The only time we had a babysitter was when we went out together so it was unsettling to see her there."
"And where was Hallie?" The words were out her mouth faster than she could try to stop them.
"She was gone. She left with a note explaining everything. She moved closer to her parents and a few weeks later, I was recieving papers saying I had sole custody of the girls. From that day on, my number one priority was protecting them and making sure I was the best parents I could be to them. A lot of people help me, it makes all the difference in the world."
"That it does."
They stayed like that, talking, for what seemed like hours before they drifted off to sleep in each other's arms, the truth finally out in the open.
a/n: So the truth is finally out for the two of them. What will this mean for the two single parents now? Stay tuned to find out.
Ok so I'm not quite sure how this chapter turned out. I knew how I wanted Gabby to tell her story since we knew the reason why she was widowed but for Matt, it took a long time before I decided on the reason WHY Hallie left him. For the record, I know NOTHING about post partum depression (not having gone through it myself after both my kids) so I hope it didn't sound cheap. Please take a few minutes to leave a review because I'm really anxious to know what you guys think of it since I'm not sure about it myself - Sarra :)
