The mistake that made us

Chapter 5

Seven months later, and I was thirty seven weeks pregnant with twins, which everyone kept reminding me as though I had somehow failed to notice.

"Ashley Whitmore, if you fall down those stairs I will never forgive myself."

Rose's voice came from the bottom of the staircase, one hand raised in a gesture that would not have caught me but made her feel better. I made my way down carefully, one hand on the rail, the other resting on what could only be described as an event.

"I am pregnant, not made of glass," I said.

"You are thirty seven weeks pregnant with twins, which is a category all its own, and if you tell me one more time that you are fine I am going to lock that door myself."

Twins. Even now the word did something strange to my chest.

Seven months in this quiet house. Rose making tea twice a day and standing over me until I finished it. Doctors every two weeks with their careful professional faces. Long afternoons in the garden growing slower as the weeks passed. Long evenings reading books I actually finished for the first time in years, because there was nothing else required of me and I had forgotten what that felt like.

I had thought about the babies constantly. Who they would look like. Whether they would have his eyes, a man whose face I still could not clearly picture. Just the broad line of his shoulders in the dark. The faint blue outline of a dragon on his upper back.

I had thought about them, and I had already begun the slow painful work of letting them go, because that was the only way I knew how to carry this.

Rose pressed the tea into my hands the moment I reached the bottom step. I sat on the couch and wrapped both hands around the cup and one of them kicked and I laughed despite myself.

The contraction came without warning.

Not the mild tightening I had read about. This was a wall of pressure that moved through my entire lower body and took my breath before I could prepare for it.

"Rose."

She was already moving. "I knew it. I told you about those stairs—"

"It is not the stairs," I managed. "Call David."

She had her phone out before I finished the sentence.

They came in under fifteen minutes, which I only know because Rose told me afterward.

By then I had lost track of time entirely. There were hands and voices and equipment and bright lights, and at some point I was in the room they had prepared, and everything had the quality of something happening very fast and very slow simultaneously. Pain that arrived and receded and arrived again, each wave more insistent than the last.

And then, cutting through all of it, a sound.

Small. Furious. Completely certain of itself.

Everything in me went quiet.

"First one is here," someone said, and I heard them carry the baby away, and my heart went with them, and I could not speak because there are no words for the specific feeling of loving something you are already in the process of losing.

"You are doing beautifully," a nurse said close to my ear. "One more. You can do this."

I did it. The second cry came, slightly different from the first, and they were gone too, and I lay back against the pillow with nothing left and stared at the ceiling.

Rose took my hand without saying anything. I was grateful for that.

A few minutes passed.

Then my body did something it was not supposed to do.

A contraction. Deep and unmistakable, nothing like the aftershocks the doctors had described. The same urgent, total pressure as before, and I heard myself make a sound before I had decided to.

"Something is wrong."

Rose was on her feet. "Doctor—"

"No." The word came out sharp. "No, I think—" Another wave, and I gripped the bed rail with both hands. "I think there is another one."

"That is impossible," Rose said, staring at me. "The doctors confirmed twins. They were very certain."

"Then explain this," I said through gritted teeth, because another wave was already building and I did not have the breath for a longer sentence.

She grabbed my hand. I held on hard enough to hurt her, which she did not mention once.

"I need to call the doctors back," she said, reaching for her phone.

"No." I met her eyes. "Aunty. Please. Do not call anyone."

She looked at me, and I watched her understand exactly what I was asking and why, the full weight of it, the impossible logic of it, and I watched her make her decision.

"Ashley," she said carefully. "The nurses have the twins. There is no one here who—"

"I just delivered two babies," I said. "I can do this. I just need you." The next contraction tore through me and I breathed hard through it. "Please."

One long moment.

Then she moved closer, took both my hands in hers, and said: "When I tell you to push, you push."

I do not know how long it took. Time had stopped working properly. There was only the pain and Rose's voice and the sound of my own breathing, and then, cutting through all of it, a sound so small and so completely itself that everything else fell away.

A cry. Different from the others. Softer at first, then louder, because she had decided she had more to say.

"It is a girl," Rose said softly.

The tears came before I could do anything about them. "Give her to me," I said, reaching out with shaking arms. "Please. Let me hold her."

Rose placed her in my arms.

I looked down at this tiny, furious, perfect person who had hidden herself for nine months, as though she had already understood the world she was being born into and had taken her time deciding whether to join it.

"Please," I said to Rose, not looking up. "Please do not tell anyone about her."

She was quiet for a moment. "You know I have an obligation," she said. Her voice was genuinely pained. "He is her father. The contract—"

"The contract was for two babies," I said. "Nobody knew about her. Not David, not the doctors, not him. She was not in any agreement." I looked down at my daughter. "She hid. She stayed hidden for nine months. She is mine, Aunty. She is the only thing that is mine."

My voice was going at the edges. Seven months of everything and the last several hours of labor were all catching up with me at once, and my arms were heavy, and my eyes were losing the argument with sleep.

"Please," I said one more time, barely awake. "Do not give her to him."

I felt Rose take her gently from my arms as the darkness pulled me under, and the last thing I heard was my daughter, still making her presence known to the world in no uncertain terms.

I woke up panicking.

On my feet before I was fully conscious, the room wrong, the bed empty beside me, and then all of it came back at once and my heart turned over.

"Where is she."

I was already moving toward the door when it opened from the other side.

David stepped in, folder under his arm, face arranged in its careful neutral. "You are awake. How are you feeling."

"Where is my daughter."