Valentino hesitated. Even though she’d yielded the album to him it felt like he needed to ask her permission. ‘May I?’
She took a shaky breath and nodded and Valentino opened the cover. He did it slowly, reverently, recognising how precious it was to Peyton and grateful that she had entrusted him with these painful memories.
The first page was a picture of Daisy again all wired up in a humidicrib. The caption beside it told Valentino that she was four hours old.
‘They were twenty-seven-weekers, yes?’
Peyton nodded. ‘Daisy was eight hundred and fifty-nine grams. McKenzie was twelve hundred.’
Ah. That explained a lot. Premature babies born under one kilo had the odds truly stacked against them.
Valentino flipped slowly through the pages, taking great care to linger over each photo with the reverence it deserved. Every picture chronicled Daisy’s battle and ever-increasing medical support. The pages were pale pink and decorated with pretty stickers, silky ribbons and baby-themed cut-outs. Every effort had been made to present Daisy as a baby, a precious gift, cherished and loved.
‘It’s a beautiful album,’ he murmured.
‘My mother made it for me after…’
Valentino didn’t push her to complete the sentence. ‘She obviously took a great deal of care with it.’
‘Mum’s very good at craftwork. She does all her own stationery and cards.’
Towards the end, the pictures became more medicalised until there were more tubes than baby. ‘She had several chest tubes, I see.’
‘She kept blowing pneumothoraxes towards the end. Her chronic neonatal lung disease was so bad they’d maxed out all their treatment options. They just… couldn’t ventilate her.’
Valentino didn’t say anything. What was there to say? It must have been agony to watch. In fact, it was written all over Peyton’s face in the photos of her holding Daisy. The album wasn’t just a timeline of Daisy’s life but a startling map of Peyton’s grief.
‘They withdrew treatment?’
‘Yes. She’d suffered so much.’ The anguish in Peyton’s voice, even after three years, sounded incredibly raw. ‘We couldn’t ask any more of her.’
The ‘we’ soon became evident as Valentino turned to the second to last page. A photo of a blond man looking down at Daisy, his hand resting against her ever-present woollen cap, gave him pause. ‘Your husband?’
Peyton nodded. ‘Arnie.’
‘When did he…’
‘Two days after Daisy’s funeral.’
Valentino gripped the edges of the album. He’d been given the Cliff Notes version of Peyton’s backstory by Alessandro and Nat but the scumbag leavingtwo daysafter he’d buried his child had not been covered.
How could he do that? How could he walk away from his grieving wife and his other little girl? What kind of a man did that?
‘Do you have contact with him? Does McKenzie see him?’
Was that one of the other factors that Peyton had to consider? Was she still carrying a candle for him? Surelynot? But they’d both been through a profoundly shattering experience together and, he assumed, they had loved each other at some stage.
And misery did make strange bedfellows.
Peyton snorted. ‘The only correspondence I’ve had from Arnie since the day I begged him not to leave has been through his lawyer during the divorce settlement.’
Her voice was laced with bitterness and Valentino knew without a shadow of a doubt that it was Arnie he had to thank for the brick wall around Peyton’s heart. But at least she seemed well and truly over him.
Valentino flipped to the last page, feeling Peyton tense even before it fully opened. And he could see why. It was a very raw photo, difficult to even look at without feeling as if he had intruded on something painfully private.
A snapshot full of utter human misery.
Peyton was holding a swaddled Daisy. She was free of all her tubes, her eyes swollen and closed, pink cap pulled snugly over her head. Her mouth was a straight line, the lips colourless, her skin deathly pale. The caption read,Rest in Peace Our Precious Daisy.
