“Yes. About the championship game. I’m at the stadium, watching your game,” she whispers, squeezing my hand back, making something prickle in my throat. “And I’m all dressed up in my tutu and my wings and I’m smiling because I know you’re gonna score the goal. But then, you look up from the field. You look directly at me and you smile too and I want to tell you that you need to keep your eye on the ball or you’ll lose but I’m so happy. So happy that you looked at me, that you didn’t care about the game and the world and you justlookedat me in the crowd. And then, I felt Halo in my belly and…” Her breaths hasten, her eyes filling with realization and her free hand flies over to her belly. “Halo. What… where’s…”
“Hey, hey.” I squeeze her hand, trying to get her attention. “She’s fine. She’s here. She’s —”
“But she wasn’t supposed to be… I fell, Roman.” She looks at me with teary, panicked eyes. “I fell at school and there was somuch pain. And I was waiting for you but you never came and Halo… where’s Halo?”
“Hey, look at me, Fae. Look at me. I’m here, okay? I’m not going anywhere. I’m not leaving.” I squeeze her hand again. I keep squeezing it as if trying to pump her heart back to life, as if to tell her lungs to breathe, just breathe. “And Halo’s fine. She’s fine. A little premature but she’s doing great, okay? There’s nothing to worry about. I promise. I promise, Fae.”
Tears are falling from her eyes, disappearing into her hair. “You promise?”
“Yeah. Yeah, I do. She’s fine. You’re fine too.”
Finally her breaths calm down. “Okay, I trust you. I need…” But with her ease comes exhaustion and her eyes are fluttering closed. “I need to see her. Take me… take me to her… she must be alone and… afraid. She must be…”
I caress her hair, rub my thumb over her almost completely shut eyelids.
And when she goes back to sleep, her breathing calm, easy, I kiss her forehead, smell her sweet scent and promise, “I won’t let her be. I won’t let Halo be afraid. Or you. Ever.”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Halo Cora Jackson is beautiful.
She’s the most beautiful baby to ever be born. I know I’m biased because I’m her mom, but I don’t care. She’s got the darkest hair and the bluest eyes, even bluer than mine, and she has the rosiest cheeks.
And she’s small.
Even now, four weeks later.
She was small to begin with. Because she wasn’t supposed to arrive so early, see. She was supposed to be here in July but she came in May.
But I’m not complaining.
I’m not complaining at all.
Even though she had to spend the first four weeks of her life in the NICU.
We didn’t expect that however. Because even though she came early because of my accident, the delivery was more or less without complications. And the doctors were hopeful that we might be able to go home within a week.
But then she developed breathing problems and her body temperature would fluctuate. So they decided to keep her and somehow my baby had to stay in her incubator for four weeks.
Those were the longest four weeks of my life.
The longest and the toughest.
Every second of which I spent hoping and praying and wishing to God that it was me. That I was the one who needed to stay at the hospital, rather than my baby who’s just so… small and precious and innocent.
That it was my body they were sticking all those tubes into instead of her fragile one.
But it wasn’t.
I’ve only been a mother for four weeks but I think I’m going to spend the rest of my life now, wishing for the same thing. That if something bad were to happen to Halo, I wish it would happen to me instead.
I was sent home after three days with a bunch of information about post-op care that I really didn’t pay attention to because I was leaving the most precious thing behind, my baby.
But there’s one person who remembered.
Him.
He remembered that I had stitches on my stomach. The stomach that was once tight and smooth but now will have a scar where they cut Halo out of me.
