Chapter 2 - The Name I Half-Remembered
My mind went somewhere ugly immediately. I wish I could say it didn't. I wish I trusted my husband so completely that standing outside a maternity room with a newborn girl behind the glass didn't send one thought punching straight through me.
His baby. Someone else's baby, with him.
I looked through the glass again. Pink blanket. Tiny hand. My stomach dropped.
"Is she yours?"
Gary looked genuinely stunned. "What?"
"Don't make me ask twice."
"No. God, no."
I stared at him. "Then whose is she?"
He rubbed both hands over his face. "Do you remember I told you about Renata?"
The name meant something. Barely. He'd said it once, maybe twice, years earlier. Before me. Before us. First love. They'd been twenty-two. Talked about a house, kids, all the things people that age believe they've already mapped out. Then life happened. They split up. Renata married someone else. Gary eventually met me. That was the whole of what I knew.
"I remember."
"I haven't spoken to her in eleven years." He said it again. "Eleven years. Not a call, not a message, nothing. I need you to know that before I say anything else."
My heart picked up speed. "Why is she here?"
Gary looked toward the room. "She was."
Was.
I heard it land. "Was?"
He nodded. Then he told me the rest of it badly — out of order, the way people do when a story still feels impossible in their own mouth.
Renata had been pregnant. Seven months along when her husband left — no warning, apparently, no attempt at reconciliation. He'd simply packed up and moved several states away. Her mother had died the year before. Her father had been gone since she was a teenager. No siblings. No close family nearby.
She went into labor at four in the morning. Drove herself toward the hospital until the contractions got too strong, then called an ambulance from a gas station parking lot. She gave birth that same morning — a little girl, six pounds and some ounces, healthy. Renata wasn't.
Something went wrong afterward. Bleeding. Then more bleeding. Then a string of words Gary had clearly heard from the doctors but couldn't quite repeat right. She went downhill fast.
May you like
"How did they even call you?" I asked. That was the part I couldn't make sense of.
Gary swallowed. "They didn't. Not at first."
