“For when we’re ready,” he said. “To remember them properly.”
I looked at the soft pink wool against my pale skin and felt something almost like peace.
I had lost my babies. I had not lost him. That was something.
“I love you,” I whispered.
“I love you more than anything in this world, Lyd.”
Daniel’s phone buzzed in his pocket.
He glanced down, and for the briefest second, something passed across his face. Then he stood.
“I have to take this. Work.
I’ll be right outside.”
He kissed my forehead and slipped out into the corridor.
An older nurse stood just past the threshold, clipboard in hand. Her eyes followed Daniel down the hallway and stayed there a beat too long.
When she noticed me watching, she looked away and moved on.
I closed my fingers tighter around the pink socks and let sleep pull me under, certain, for the last time, that I was not alone.
Then the older nurse came in to change my IV.
She had been the one to sit with me through the worst of the first night, when the morphine made me cry for babies that were no longer there. She had not said much. She had only held my wrist and let me ruin the shoulder of her uniform.
Since then, every time she came on shift, she touched my forehead the way my grandmother used to, like she was checking for more than fever.
That night, she moved more quietly than usual.
She checked the bag, adjusted the tape on my wrist, and stood looking down at me. Her eyes were misty.
Her hand brushed my pillow, and she leaned in like she were fixing the corner of it.
“Sweetheart,” she whispered, “I would not say this if I had a daughter and someone knew. Your husband has been bringing flowers and packages to another ward while you were unconscious.
Number 8. I told you nothing.”
She straightened, smoothed the blanket, and squeezed my ankle once through the sheet before she walked out without looking back.
I lay there, rattled.
For hours I counted ceiling tiles.
Forty-two across, sixteen down.
I kept reaching for explanations. A colleague. A cousin.
A friend from work whose name Daniel had simply never bothered to mention while I was busy giving birth too early.
At 5 a.m., I pushed the blanket back. My stitches pulled like wire under the skin, and my legs felt borrowed. I grabbed the IV stand and used it like a cane.
The corridor was empty.
A young aide slept with her cheek on her forearm at the nurses’ station. I shuffled past her, one slow step at a time.
Down the long hallway. Through the double doors.
Past a janitor who looked up, then politely looked away.
Ward 8 was at the end of a quieter wing. The numbers on the doors climbed slowly. Four.
Six. Eight.
The door was cracked open. A soft yellow light spilled into the corridor, and inside it, I heard Daniel’s voice.
Not the voice he used at meetings or with my mother on the phone.
The voice he used to use on me, years ago, when we were still new and I was not yet a list of failed pregnancies.
“She’s beautiful,” he was saying. “She has your nose.”
A woman laughed softly.
“She has my stubbornness, Daniel. She would not sleep all night.”
I pressed my palm flat against the door.
“Just a little while,” he said.
“Then I have to go back. She woke up yesterday; she keeps asking where I am.”
“Go,” the woman said. “We are fine.
We will be fine.”
I pushed the door open.
The room was warm. There was a bouquet of white lilies on the windowsill, and a paper bag from the bakery I liked.
In the bed sat a woman holding a newborn against her chest, the baby’s tiny hand curled into her hospital gown. She lifted her face toward the door, and I just froze.
I knew that face.
I had sat behind it in chemistry class.
I had watched it laugh in a yearbook photo Daniel kept in a shoebox in our garage.
Samantha.
She saw me, and her smile froze halfway. The baby made a small sound against her shoulder.
Daniel turned, a bunch of pink tulips in his hand, and the color drained from his face so fast I watched it happen.
Nobody spoke. The baby breathed against Samantha’s neck, and the three of us stood in a silence that would not let any of us out.
“Lydia, oh my God!” Daniel finally said.
“You shouldn’t be out of bed.”
I held onto the doorframe.
“I went down for coffee and ran into her in the hallway. I didn’t even know she had been admitted here.”
From the bed, Samantha lifted her hand in a small, careful wave.
“Hi, Lydia.
It has been a long time. I’m so sorry about your girls. Daniel mentioned, and I just wanted to say I was thinking of you.”
I looked at her, then at the bassinet beside her, and finally at the baby in her arms.
Something in me cracked wide open. It wasn’t jealousy, not exactly. It was the unbearable truth that I should have been holding my daughters too.
“Hey, been a long time,” I finally said, forcing a small smile.
Daniel crossed the room and put his arm around my waist.
“Let me take you back, sweetheart.
You’re bleeding through your gown. Please.”
I let him walk me down the corridor.
But the stone settled in my chest and would not move.
Over the next two days, I watched him.
The way he tilted his phone screen away when he typed. The way his eyes slid past mine whenever I mentioned Ward 8.
“How is she doing?” I asked once, casually, stirring sugar into tea I could not taste.
“Who?”
“Oh, fine, I think. I haven’t been back up there.”
He had been back.
The nurse with the kind eyes had told me again that evening.
***
On discharge day, I dressed slowly. My stitches still pulled. The two pink socks sat folded in my palm like a prayer.
I waited in the lobby for Daniel to bring the car around.
Instead, a yellow taxi pulled up, and he came through the sliding doors with a paper bag of my medications and a guilty smile.
“Baby, I am so sorry.
There’s a meeting at the office I cannot push. The Henderson account. You remember.”
“You booked me a cab?”
“I prepaid it,” he replied.
“The driver is lovely. You’ll be home in twenty minutes and I’ll be right behind you, I promise.”
He kissed my forehead the way he had every morning of this nightmare week.
“Go rest, Lydie. I love you.”
I climbed into the back seat, clutching the socks.
The driver, an older man with gray at his temples, nodded at me in the mirror and pulled into traffic without a word.
I rested my head against the cool window and closed my eyes.
When I opened them, we were stopped at a red light, and two lanes over sat Daniel’s silver sedan. He was in the driver’s seat. Samantha was in the passenger seat.
Strapped into a car seat in the back was the baby from Ward 8.
He was laughing at something she had said.
My hand went flat against my empty belly, against the place where my daughters had been.
“Sir,” I urged softly. “Please.
Don’t lose that silver car.”
The driver glanced at me in the mirror, took in the hospital bracelet, and nodded once.
We wound through the city, out past the bypass, into a quiet street on the outskirts. Daniel parked in front of a modest house with a small garden. A stroller already sat on the porch.
I watched him lift the baby from the car seat with a tenderness I knew by heart.
Samantha followed him inside.
