“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. The two pink socks sat folded in my palm like a prayer. “How is she doing?” I asked once, casually, stirring sugar into tea I could not
taste. “Who?” “Samantha.” “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. “You booked me a cab?” “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.
He was laughing at something she had said.
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.
“Ma’am. You don’t have to go in.”
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.
The driver turned in his seat, his voice low, like he understood exactly what it had done to me to see my husband carrying another woman’s child and walking her into a home that wasn’t mine.
“Ma’am. You don’t have to go in.”
“I do.”
The sound that left me was not a scream.
I walked to the door and slowly pushed it open.
Daniel was holding the baby with one arm, his lips against Samantha’s forehead. They both turned and froze.
Daniel’s arm dropped to his side.
“LYDIA?”
The sound that left me was not a scream. It was something smaller, more broken.
“How long?”
“Lydie, please. Let me explain.”
“How long, Daniel?”
His shoulders folded inward. The baby stirred against his chest.
Samantha had gotten pregnant around the same time I did.
“Three years. I couldn’t leave you. Not while you were still trying. Not after the miscarriages.”
Samantha pressed a hand to her mouth, her eyes filling slowly with shock.
“Lyd, I’m so sorry. We met three years ago and… it just happened.”
“It just happened?” I hissed.
Then Daniel told me Samantha had gotten pregnant around the same time I did.
“He promised he was going to sort things out slowly,” Samantha added.
A dry laugh worked its way up my throat. “He promised me a lot of things, too.”
“People make mistakes. I never wanted to lose you.”
I looked at the baby. I looked at the man who had carried two pink socks in his pocket while another woman carried his child.
“In one week, I lost my daughters. And I lost my husband.” I drew a slow breath and met Daniel’s eyes. “I will not lose myself too.”
“Lydie, please,” Daniel pleaded. “People make mistakes. I never wanted to lose you.”
Samantha turned on him right away, but I was too shattered and too furious to hear another word. I turned and walked back to the taxi, where the driver was already holding the door open for me.
“Where to, Ma’am?”
I looked at the pink socks in my palm. Two tiny pairs, for two daughters who would never wear them.
My late father helped me buy it.
“I need a lawyer,” I said. “My sister gave me a number months ago when I asked for some legal advice about my estate, but I never called. Then home.”
He nodded and pulled away from the curb.
I did not look back at Samantha’s house or at Daniel calling after me from the doorway. I wasn’t leaving my house to him, not after everything. My late father helped me buy it.
I packed up Daniel’s things.
The moment I got back after meeting the lawyer, I packed up Daniel’s things, set them outside, and left a note on top: “Talk to my lawyer.”
The pink socks now remain in a wooden box on the windowsill, beside a photograph of two heartbeats on a screen.
I kept painting the unfinished portrait of my daughters, the one I’d started so hopefully before my water broke too soon. I dipped the brush back into the paint and kept going.
