Archways and Endings

A/N: Thanks guys:) You know what I've realized? Summer is a time for change, and you should try your best to get out there and try to do things you wouldn't do. I for instance, this week dyed my hair. It's not purple or anything. But it's a shade darker, with a hint of red. :) I'm also trying my best to stay positive and ignore my own family life stress and not let it consume me. So here's to the summer of change and a new chapter as a cherry on top.

Warning: A few sexual references this chapter. Can't be considered smut, but there are a few references. I'm not a doctor nor have I EVER studied medicine, so some of my medical facts in this chapter might be incorrect. (Though I'm pretty positive that I'm correct, I do watch the discovery health channel A LOT, but you never know.)

And by the way IT WAS NOT NATHAN or anyone else that we know. (Paige even at four, would have recognized her uncle's voice) He has no face or name. Neither one of them did, they just both had brown hair. I AM NOT THAT CRUEL! (though that would add a pretty cool spin on the story huh?) just kidding. I can't promise that one of you guys suggested 'lovers' for Brooke won't come back in later chapters. And that's all I'm going to say about that.

Empty Eyes: You get what you wanted, Brooke's side. I understand exactly what you were saying in your review. (And I'm glad we might actually agree on something :D ) I had planned to do this anyway, but I'm glad you get your wish:)

And just so you know, Lucas affair(s) will be covered in later chapters ;)

-Kelsey

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Six: Happiness has a Violent Roar

June 14, 2016

Tree Hill, North Carolina

Brooke

I have tried my best to be happy. With Lucas, with Paige, with the life I was given. But it didn't matter how hard I tried to make things perfect, I soon found that just because you marry a man and have his baby, it doesn't necessarily mean he will always be there in the way a husband should, and love you the way a husband should. It doesn't mean that at all. It means that I sacrificed the life I could have had, and gave it to him instead, as well as our then infant daughter.

Babies need their mothers, but what they don't tell you is that they grow up and push and shove to show that they can do all of these things you try to do for them on their own. Paige is beautiful, and articulate, and stubborn, and she can do anything. I'm lucky to have her as a daughter. When she was just about three, she started riding that little plastic tricycle thing. Paige would put on her favorite white shorts and ask me to braid her perfect mane of curly brown hair. (The only thing she couldn't do, alone) And we'd go out into the complex's parking lot and I set Paige on the sidewalk. And she'd pedal as hard as humanly possible and giggle and call out, "Mommy look at me!" I'd smile and giggle right along with her, but even then I knew one day she wouldn't need me.

Most mother's say that day comes when you drop your child off at college, but I know now it comes when your daughter looks at you with disgust, because she's ashamed you are her mom, she's ashamed of your actions. I have no one to blame but myself, meeting that co-worker in a public place, playing footsie with him under the table like a thirteen year old girl, holding his hand. There is nothing I can say to that fact or the fact I've slept with him about three times in the office. I do not love him, or even care for him, but at least when I'm with him I feel alive. I don't feel like the world is going to crumble around me. I don't look at his face and see the heartbreak of us losing three babies, I don't see him kissing someone else, especially her, I don't see him hung-over begging me to forgive him, I just see a man who I have no history with, who is just trying to have a nice time. And I'm okay with that.

Lucas knows, just like I always do. He can smell cologne on me that isn't his, he can taste someone else in my mouth, he can feel the spots that we're long ago unclothed not by him. He never says anything on these nights, his mouth deepens our closeness, and he pulls me down on our bed to make love to me. If I was honest, the sex is always better when one of us is cheating. One of us is always trying to prove that there is still something left, in that space between us.

"Paige," I call out. My daughter sits at the island, feet away, headphones in her ears, and the sound pours through to the point where even I can hear the music she's listening to.

"Paige!"

"What?!" She yells as she's takes the buds out of her ears.

"Your music, it's too loud."

She rolls her eyes and pushes her bangs out of her face. "Okay,"

"Turn it down."

She laughs bitterly. "Don't you mean turn it up?" "I'm sure that's what you told him,"

"Paige Karin," I sigh.

"Don't Paige Karin me," I want to laugh because she sounds so much like me. "I cannot believe you,"

I shake my head and feel tears come to my eyes. "It was nothing," I tell her.

"Do not lie to me mom, please." I hear the edge in her voice. She wants to cry too.

"I'm not,"

"Do you love him?"

"Of course not," I reply quickly.

"Then what's it worth," She chokes out tears spilling out of her brilliant blue eyes. "What's that worth if you don't even love him?" She then stomps out of the room and leaves me alone with that truth. What is it worth?

Honestly I don't know. I always get a certain way around this time of year, around that time when I lost Kaden Nathanial. I remember when I found out I was pregnant with him. I had never been so happy. Luke and I were settled into married life, or at least I thought we were. Paige was five, the perfect age for a baby brother. I imagined him, blonde with big brown eyes, playing basketball with his daddy. He seemed perfect in all the ultrasound photos, if only that were true.

I carried him inside of me for five and half months, Haley always commented on the glow I wore. Twenty-two with two children, the irony always made me smile. Lucas became someone I forgot he could be he became the man I fell in love with all of those years ago. He took care of me and Paige, he stopped drinking, and painted the nursery a beautiful robin blue but then it happened, I lost him.

June 13 2006, I woke up feeling wet, like I peed myself, like my water broke. But that's not what it was; the sheets were soaked in blood. Lucas was in Charlotte, tying some loose ends of Karen's; about some property she'd wanted to sell. I felt the blood traveling down my thighs and I began to scream, this couldn't be happening. My son, my baby, this had to have been some crazy dream. So I got out of bed, struggling, the pain in my body was intense, I had never been in that much pain, ever and I grabbed the phone, calling 911, then Haley.

"Hello?" she answered in a yawn.

"Hales," I said my voice was breaking, my flannel pants were saturated in blood, and I felt so weak.

"Brooke?" She asked alarmed.

"Something happened. I need you to come over and get Paige." My voice had started to drop off, my eye lids were dropping. .

"BROOKE! Oh my god, Brooke. You're scaring me. Are you okay?"

"Kaden…" I breathed, I was crying, and then the world went black.

I'm told the ambulance came with in a few minutes after I talked to Haley. I lost about 80 percent of the blood in my body, I hemorrhaged like crazy. I was told I could have died, but he died. Isn't that important enough? I was told there was nothing we could have done to save him, that I didn't do anything wrong, that his umbilical cord just ruptured, no warning, no cause, it just kind of happened. I was his mother; my only job was to carry him inside of me for nine months, so he could grow, and come out as a beautiful, healthy, little boy. I couldn't even do that.

I can't do anything right, I'm a failure as a mother. I lost a little girl, two years later, and another baby in the first twelve weeks, three years after that. Their faces are ghosts in my mind; they never leave, and pop up when around other children. The little girl, we were going to name her Hannah Rae, I imagine her with dirty blonde hair, hazel-green eyes, I see her when I'm with Sawyer. I see Kaden in Davis and Jamie, he'd be around their age, playing basketball, driving all the little girls wild. The other baby has no face, but in when the quiet takes over my mind, I can hear it crying, I can hear it cooing, trying it's best to communicate with me, like newborns do, I can hear that baby being alive. Then there's Paige, who can't even stand to look at me and I really can't blame her. How could I?

"I'm happy," I whisper to myself in the empty kitchen I now stand in. The words bounce off the clean metal pans hanging on the rack above the stove and the walls that surround the room.

Who ever knew I'd tell myself such lies?

-TBC-

Tell me you don't feel a little bad for Brooke. Can you imagine losing three babies? That's awful. Paige is pissed at her, her and Lucas's relationship is as WEIRD as ever. I mean really could you stay married to someone after all that, could you really live like that? God, I couldn't. I sympathize with Brooke so much. Please tell me what you think of this chapter. Hopefully it was a little insightful. Even though this takes place a few days after last chapter, I felt that it was more a flashback chapter, because of all the past in it. So, the ghosts of Lucas and Brooke are a LOT bigger than high school, huh?

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