OUT OF THE RED ↝ dave grohl

one-hundred-fourteen.

DECEMBER 1st, 1998, LOS ANGELES, CA

       WHEN REAGAN LOOKED back on her twenty-nine years of life, she couldn't recall a worse year than nineteen-ninety-eight. Her twenty-ninth year, the last year before she entered her thirties, and it seemed rather appropriate that everything had fallen apart before she'd aged into a new decade of living.

Sometimes she questioned how she'd survived a year's worth of existing on autopilot. It was a curse to have felt so empty while being forced to live every day like things were normal. She supposed that someone, someone like Kimberly, would have told her 'that's life." She'd tried to tell herself that it was indeed just life, a facet of being painfully human, but she was starting to reject the notion.

Reagan had Gracie to tend to. She had her job to focus on, a beast in itself with its demanding workload that was unlike what she'd faced in Seattle. The former of those two responsibilities was the most important to her. The only thing that drew her out of bed each day was her daughter, waiting on her to be the mother that she needed.

It had been a little over a month since Dave had told her that he'd cheated on her. While Reagan had presumed the earlier bulk of the year to have been her lowest point, nothing compared to the weeks that had followed after Dave's confession to her after his weekend in Mexico.

She wasn't sad. She wasn't angry. She felt nothing, imagining that some vital piece of her soul had died and taken the core of who she was along with it.

Both Kate and Chris had been reprimanding her over the phone for days, demanding to know why she hadn't left Dave yet.

'He CHEATED on you,' Kate had seethed. 'Why are you giving him the impression that that's okay by STAYING?'

Chris's response had been less scathing, though the implication of warning had still been there.

'Get out while you can,' she'd said, 'before he does it again.'

Reagan had fed them both the same line, too drained to go on a tangent about how she really felt and how complicated it was to walk away from everything she'd cherished for the past nine years.

'I'm not going to tell Gracie that her parents are getting a divorce with Christmas right around the corner,' was her default reply.

It wasn't entirely a lie. The thought of sitting Gracie down before one of the happiest times of the year for a kid her age and revealing that she and Dave were separating seemed utterly heartless. She didn't want to think about what kind of a mother that would have made her if she'd done that, ripping apart her child's family when Gracie was supposed to be reveling in it.

Yet, Gracie wasn't the only thing that kept Reagan in uncomfortably close living quarters with Dave.

She was terrified to let him go.

Despite what he'd done, she had come to understand that nothing in the world, not even his infidelity, had made her stop loving him. It was true what he'd said about fucking up. Sleeping with Louise had been a mistake, but it hadn't kept Reagan's heart from yearning for him, wanting and wishing for him as she'd had from the beginning.

She couldn't trust him, though. No amount of love that she had for him could have replenished the trust that he'd poured gasoline on and torched. Cheating on her had been out of his character, but he'd done it anyways and it was undeniable that it had changed things.

Reagan had believed that fall that they could have worked on the problems they'd unearthed earlier that year. She'd been hell bent on fixing them, convinced that she could live in a relationship that consisted of her and the Foo Fighters as dual partners, but her effort to try had been wiped out.