On my way out of the hospital, I swore Maddie and Regan to secrecy with the one exception of telling Patrick. I don’t want anyone else to know yet. Especially Trevor’s parents. It’s still early, and there’s always a risk of miscarriage. They would be devastated to find out I was carrying Trevor’s child only to have to go through more grieving if something went wrong.
Devastated wouldn’t even begin to describe howI’dfeel if that happened.
Somehow, however, deep down, I know this baby will be okay. The timing of it can’t be a coincidence. This is how I hold on to my love and keep his memory alive. Through his son or daughter. By telling our child how much he or she was loved by parents who tried for years to bring him or her into the world. By sharing our love story with our child.
I’ve never been more grateful to have the box of letters than I am right now. Over the past weeks, those letters have been my lifeline to him. But now I know they’ll serve a more importantpurpose. They will be the gateway to our child knowing their father.
After assuring friends and family I’m okay, that I was simply suffering from stress and a bit of dehydration, I’m braving the cold once more to go to the one place I swear I can stillfeelhim. And as I sit under the massive maple tree, its large, bare branches looming over me like protective fingers, warm tears flood my cold cheeks as I tell Trevor the words I’ve longed to say since the day I became his wife.
“You’re going to be a daddy, my love.”
Chapter Six
Dear Baby,
Yes, you read that right. I haven’t written in a diary for over a decade, and it didn’t seem right to just jump back in and expect it to be there for me as it had in the past.
But I have all these feelings. Big feelings that had nowhere to go but on these pages.
Because today is the day I buried my love, my life, my soulmate, my husband.
Today is also the day I found out about you, dear Baby. And if you look really hard at the pages, you might find droplets of tears. It might be hard to decipher which are the happy ones and which ones are sad. I probably couldn’t even do it myself. I’ve been all over the place today. In a matter of hours I went from being the broken woman standing over your daddy’s grave, to the excited girl who finally found out she’shaving a baby, to the grieving widow who realizes she’s going to have to do it all on her own.
Thus the truckload of feelings.
I like to think he knows about you. I like to think he’ll be your guardian angel. I like to think he’s going to be there with me, even if only in spirit, through each milestone. Your first smile. Your first tooth. Your first step. Your first skinned knee. Your first love. Your first heartbreak. Your wedding.
What breaks my heart the most, however, is among all those milestones, I know one major one will be missing. The first time you say Daddy.
See this tear drop right here→
Yeah, that’s definitely a sad one.
Other than my two very best friends, Patrick Kelsey, and some random medical personnel, nobody even knows about you yet. Nobody knows you’re this little bundle of cells that in a matter of hours has become my reason for living, my light in the darkness, my way of holding on to your dad and keeping his memory alive.
Are you a divine intervention? I’ve never been a very religious person. Sure, I grew up saying prayers at the dinner table. Well, it was my mother who was saying all the prayers. Okay, it was really only one prayer, something about blessing the food and putting it to the betterment of our bodies or something like that.
I was never truly and properly introduced to God if he exists, so I’m not even sure I believe in divine interventions. But you, my dear Baby, happening at this very moment after all the years we tried for a baby—is that merely a coincidence? Maybe there are no coincidences in life.
Is it a coincidence that I kept my old diary all this time? Old diaries sometimes get thrown away during a spring cleaning. Maybe they’ll get looked at briefly before getting tossed. Laughed at for all the adolescent dreams written on the ratty old pages. But I have to wonder just how many people actually keep them.
Maybe it was for you. Perhaps you’re meant to read it one day so you can understand how much I loved him.
I think I’m going to keep you to myself for just a little while longer. Because even though the thought of you growing inside me makes me want to smile, I can’t smile. Not yet. Not today. I’m going to keep you to myself until I can shout to the world about you and smile with just a little less sadness.
Will it be a week? A month? I know it can’t be more than two or three. By then, I won’t have to announce anything, people will clearly see the product of my and your daddy’s love growing inside me.
Is it strange to already have this strong feeling that you’re a girl? Even though having a boy—one with a kind spirit, strong will, and amazing blue eyes—would be such an incrediblereminder of him. But no, I think you’re a girl. I think you and I will be best friends. I think I’ll show you pictures every day and tell you stories every night so you’ll know who your father was.
I think I’ll even continue to write to you, maybe even after you arrive. Then, someday, maybe when I’m older and you’ve gone off to college or gotten married, maybe I’ll compile all my diary entries and all your dad’s letters, and all of these notes, into a book.
When you read it, you’ll know how much you were wanted. You’ll know it wasn’t a choice for your dad to leave. Because he would never leave me… us. His letters prove it. You’ll see just how much he loved me. How much he wanted you, even if it was just the idea of you at the time.
I wish I could honor him in your name. But there’s just no way to make Trevor into a female name.
Or maybe there is.
Here’s another tear →
