Author's Note:

Here it is… I'm surprised as many people who have reviewed and PMed me and said that they were okay with this twist. The question that I had asked my roommate was what she thought would drive Mac to drink again, and it all just started playing out in my head like a not so pretty little picture. I'm hoping that you are all enjoying this. Have a lovely weekend and review if you would like!

When they get home, they walk in through the garage without a word to each other. She places her purse and keys on the table entering the kitchen and he watches her every move before gesturing to the chair for both of them to sit down.

"When did it start?"

"A few weeks ago…" she adds as a few silent tears start their trek down her face.

"Was it just one time?" he asks, knowing the answer already from the tears falling down her cheeks.

"Harm, I'm sorry…" she starts, sounding do desperate and unlike herself.

"Where is it?"

She looks up then, knowing what he was asking and feeling ashamed that he had to ask her. The tears continue to fall as she can't make the words she needs to. She's shaking her head, not because she doesn't want to give him the answer, but because she can't imagine that they are having this conversation. She really had been so happy with the idea of them and their life together. It had taken so long and she went through so much to get to that point, and then it seemed like one thing set it all off.

"Mac… where is it?" he asks again with more insistence.

"Ummm… there are a few bottles downstairs by the Christmas boxes… one in the guest bathroom… " she says shakily, wiping her eyes before continuing, "and there's some mixed with the pop in the fridge…"

He gets up immediately, first walking to the fridge and dumping the soda down the drain, and next walking away from her toward the places that she mentioned. She watches him pour bottles down the drain and somehow finds the will to stop her tears as she thinks to herself about how she did this to herself… to them. How she was weak, and certainly not the woman she had convinced herself she had become.

When he sits back down after taking the trash out, he places his hands on her knees, sitting across from her, "Is that it?"

She nods with her jaw set in a tight clench.

"Is it because I was gone?" he asks, breaking her heart.

"I… can't." she sputters out, not wanting him to blame himself for what happened, but also not wanting him to know the truth.

"Mac, you've got to tell me what's going on… something happened while I was gone. I thought that you were okay with everything. You didn't say that you weren't okay with everything. I knew that I should have pushed you the other day. You weren't sounding right, and I should have said something else, I should have asked you what was wrong again."

He's blaming himself already, so she knows that it has to come out now. She can't help the tears from falling now as she sits back up in her chair and holds onto her stomach as if willing the baby that she lost to be there… willing this to be a happy moment for the two of them.

"I was pregnant…"

"You were what?" he says, swallowing as his eyes go wide realizing the implications of how she phrased that statement.

"I didn't know about it until I was losing the baby… but I was about six weeks along and they were delivering the furniture and there was this pain. That is how I got to know Jenna. When Matt was delivering the furniture, he noticed that there was something wrong. At the time, I could barely stand upright and I think I looked pretty worse for wear, so he insisted that he get someone to take me to the hospital."

"You're okay though… are you physically okay?" he asks, wanting her to understand that he was concerned more for her health than anything at this point.

"When they did the ultrasound, there was still tissue remaining. They had to get it out because I told them that I couldn't wait for it to pass. Can you believe that they give you a choice? You could wait to see if the tissue passes on its own… I just… I couldn't relive… but the doctor says that I'm fine. They don't know why I miscarried."

He puts his face in his hands for a moment, letting everything sink in, and when he comes back up to face her, his eyes are rimmed with tears.

"Sarah, why didn't you tell me?" he says, so quietly and with such emotion that she can barely stand it.

"We both wanted the miracle… in the back of both of our heads I think we were thinking that we would be able to do the kid thing on our own… and we had it for a split second and we didn't even know it… and then it was gone. I lost our son or daughter and it was just too much. I couldn't tell you because I was ashamed."

"You have nothing to be ashamed of. You didn't know you were pregnant in the first place and you just told me that they don't know why it happened."

He reaches for her then, but she stands up to pace for a moment before leaning up against the kitchen island. She doesn't want him to be close to her right now, she doesn't want to need him like that. If she needs him… if she gives in to his comfort, it's all over and she can't do what she knows she needs to do.

"We went out to dinner one night and Jenna ordered wine and I just said that I wanted the same… and it was the first time that I could forget about everything. I threw myself into getting the house ready and that was enough initially. Then it all started creeping in and we had the dinner… so then I would chase the work on the house with a shot or so of whatever I could get to calm myself down or stop the ideas from creeping up. Then, when you got home, I thought that I could take care of it on my own…."

"Until I talked about the kids and the puppy this afternoon in the Commissary." He says, standing up and making his way over to her.

He has to force his arms around her as she resists him with all she has, "No, Harm… you shouldn't love me like this. I'm a drunk and apparently a horrible mother because our own child didn't want to even be. You can't still love me… so I'll make it easy for you."

When she wrestles herself out of his embrace, she takes the rings off her left hand and places them on the counter before walking upstairs. She made the decision while they were in the car. He deserved better than this and she wasn't going to put him through what her mother went through with a drunk for a spouse.

He grabs both off the counter and follows after her a few minutes, knowing that she needed to cool down a little bit before he came up to her. She's packing up a suitcase when he walks into the bedroom.

"Sarah Rabb, you aren't going anywhere, because I love you…" he says, coming up behind her to wrap his arms around her waist and then place the rings back on her finger. "I love you and I loved that baby that we didn't get to meet as much as you did. He or she wasn't meant to be, so we have to wait for our next opportunity, if you want that. We will find you meetings to go to, we'll talk to Jenna and Matt about what happened tonight because she is your friend and she needs to know. You and I aren't walking out on each other. We've done that before and it just landed us back at the beginning… but every time we ended with each other. We aren't running now… ever… I haven't had enough time with you. We haven't gotten a chance to have our family and do all the old married couple things that seem like things we would hate but we have to do them in our life. We're getting through this."

"You should hate me." She says quietly, nearly shaking as the tears spill out of her.

"But I don't, and I never will. You're everything to me and I've got a whole future wrapped up in you."

She turns then, looking him in the eye and seeing the raw emotion there before letting her walls come crumbling down and falling into him. She was absolutely broken, and since the night she had left the hospital, she hadn't allowed herself to feel it at all.

They sit on the floor with him holding her as she cries for another hour or so before she finally calms down enough to speak again, "I'm so sorry about the baby."

"You have nothing to be sorry about… I'm sorry that I wasn't here for you when you needed me."

"You didn't know."

"Still…" he says, truly feeling guilty about not being there for her.

"Harm, if you could have only heard my thoughts in that moment, watching the doctor with the ultrasound searching for something I didn't think would ever be there. Then when she found it, she just put her hand on mine and gave me this look of… of pity. I just had these thoughts running through my head of all the things I shouldn't have been doing because I was pregnant, like moving the entire house by myself or painting all the rooms… Maybe it was the stress of everything… I just… I wanted it. I wanted it so bad once I knew I could have had it."

He lets the tears fall again as she confesses her thoughts, opening up to him about what she had felt at the time. If he told her how he felt, it would be the same thoughts. He wanted the family and knew that it was going to be hard for the two of them to get that. The fact that it had been within reach was too hard to think about.

"So, what do you want to do now?" he asks quietly, still holding her close.

"I want to be back where we were when we first got here. I want to talk about all of it again."

"Okay, so we talk."

"I didn't realize how hard it was going to be leaving the Corps and I didn't realize how badly I wanted to start a family until I realized that it was a possibility and then it was taken from me."

"So, we take it step by step. Do you want to go back to the Corps?"

"I've thought about it, but I can't leave you. I know that you were willing to drop the Navy for me, but I'm never going to ask you to do that. So, No. But I do want to find something to do with my time that will make me feel like I'm doing some good."

"And a family?" he asks, worried about the fact that it was a trigger for her.

" I need to get help with my alcohol again so we can start talking about a family."

"That is something that you want right away?"

"The doctor that saw me the morning after the miscarriage told me that she didn't agree with my doctor at Bethesda, and the fact that we were able to conceive without any help was something she thought was very promising. She just doesn't know if the miscarriage was because of my endometriosis or not."

"In other words, you could get pregnant and lose the baby again."

"Yes."

"But you still want to do this? You still want to try?"

"Yes."

"When?"

"As soon as we can." She says as if it was the most obvious answer.

"Mac, I want this just as bad as you do, but I really think we should wait until we get on our feet with everything else. Get the house settled, go see someone about the drinking, and maybe even go see someone about the two of us. You just said that you want to get help with your alcohol before we really sit down and talk babies, but I think there is more that we need. I know that we said in Washington that it was all going to slip out from under us, and it did. We need that footing, and you were right. We couldn't have seen this part coming though."

"You want to see a marriage counselor? We've been married for less than two months and you are not the guy that wants to talk about your feelings." She says, confused that he would put something like that on the table and laughing at the last part.

"It isn't because I think there is anything wrong, but I think we both have stuff that we need to talk through to get us where we need to be, you know? We have this huge past behind both of us and no matter what we do, it comes back. And we have these plans for the future that I think we are both ready for but our heads are getting in the way. We're so good at talking to each other, but something still isn't setting with both of us, and maybe someone can help with that."

"I never thought I would drink again… even after what had happened with Dalton I looked at everything and realized how stupid I had been. The night I got back after drinking with Jenna, I threw up and I felt so guilty about the whole thing. Then the next morning, a nurse called to follow up from the week before and I got in the car and went to the store on autopilot. Even after so many years."

"We all have triggers that make us do stupid things… don't you remember me firing a gun in the courtroom?"

"And what was that trigger?" she says, the first real smile coming to her face in the past few hours.

"I hadn't lost a case yet, and I wasn't going to lose it to a girl… let alone a Marine."

"A Marine and girl you ended up marrying sailor."

"I'd do all of it over again, Sarah… but I wonder if we would have been better off figuring it out right away."

"And skipping ejecting out of a Russian MIG? Nah."

They sit for a minute, letting the jokes fall off their shoulders as they think ahead to what they have to do going forward.

"What do you want to do next?"

"I think I need to go to a meeting, and then I want to see about a counselor. In a month or so I also want to talk to the doctor about the possibility of having children in the near future."

"Only if the counselor says that it is a good idea."

"Agreed."

"And in the immediate hour?"

"I want to sleep. I want to go to bed and wake up in your arms and know that everything is going to work itself out because we're Harm and Mac… the unstoppable duo."

"The unstoppable duo? Really?" he says, laughing.

"Everyone said it was inevitable, you and me… so I guess that's what you could say."

"I love you, Sarah."

"I love you too, Harm."