All the Little Things

Prologue

"This was a mistake, Luca," Becca says, packing up her bags. She refuses to look up at the man standing behind her, a baby wailing in the background. The sound has her tensing up, hands shaking as she zips up her bag. She grabs onto the strap, slinging the bag across her shoulder as she turns around. "I can't do this anymore."

"Do what?" her boyfriend asks, his voice grating, most likely from the exhaustion weighing on him. The baby refuses to sleep, and that has kept both of them up.

"Pretend." She forces her self to look up, her limp hair falling away from her face.

"What are you-"

She cuts him off, steeling herself against the anger that she knows is going to come. "I can't pretend to like it here anymore." He opens his mouth to speak, but she shakes her head, not wanting to hear his arguments. "I wasn't ready to be a mom, I don't think I ever will be. And- and I tried, Luca, but," she shakes her head again, eyes falling to the ground. "There is nothing there between us. I don't love her, and I can't stay trapped here. I'll go mad."

"We can find you someone to talk to, Becca, but you can't just leave. She needs you. I need you."

She shakes her head, looking up at her boyfriend. "No, you don't. Neither of you does. You'll move on, Luca. I already have."

His mouth drops open at her words but she forces herself to walk past him. The baby's cries get louder as she walks past the nursery.

And nothing.

She doesn't feel a thing. No desire to quiet the child, no pinch in her chest. There is nothing pushing her to hold that baby in there that she had birthed only a month ago.

When she had found out she was pregnant, her stomach had dropped and her anxiety grew. Luca had been ecstatic, and she was not surprised. He boyfriend had been talking to her for years about expanding their family, but it wasn't something she wanted. She wanted to focus on her career. She had spent years in college and then graduate school in order to become a lawyer. After all those years of schools and internships, she had finally gotten her foot in the door at a major law firm. This is everything she wanted, everything she had been working for.

Never in her life had she desired for a baby. Sure, whenever someone brought it up, she was quick to remark, "Maybe, someday," but she had not meant it. She had thought that 'maybe someday' was far in the future. But it wasn't.

Something had happened. The condom had broke or her birth control failed. Something that had allowed her to become pregnant. She had been so careful, and look what happened.

Becca lifts up her key ring, quickly taking off the house key and setting it on the little table next to the front door before walking out of the place she had spent for the last five years. It had never been home to her, so leaving wasn't hard.

The rain is pouring down, plastering her hair to her face, but she can't help but smile. The weight that had been pulling her down for years was finally being washed away. It was like she was showering away the chains.

With a smile on her face, she walked away from the life she had been pretending to live for the last six years and got into her car to drive away.

She was free to finally to be happy, and she wasn't about to let guilt hold her back any longer. The car started easily, and she pulled out of the driveway. As the house got farther away in the distance, the last of her responsibilities dwindled, nothing but the future ahead of her.