He? I struggled to sit up from my laying position. Charlie noticed, and he carefully helped to maneuver me onto my back. Hoarsely, I asked, “It’s a boy?”
“Yes. A boy,” Mama said, but her voice wasn’t as joyful as I expected it to be. There was hesitation there.
Fear.
I expected the baby to be placed onto my chest, but nobody moved to do that. The room was too silent. I grew still. “Why… why isn’t he crying?”
Nobody answered. Charlie had gone stiller than the grave, stuck in a moment in time.
Luana was holding something, but it was so small I couldn’t see what it was. I knew it had to be my baby.
I reached out my arms for the child. I didn’t know why, until I realized that I was this child’s mother, and there was an instinctual reaction that if something was wrong with my baby, I could make it right, no matter what was wrong with them.
She didn’t put him into my arms, but instead, into the incubator. So many doctors and nurses were crowding around it, maneuvering tubes, calling for supplies. I saw the light of Luana’s healing magic and the crease between her eyes, trying to heal whatever was inside that glass dome.
He still didn’t cry.
The medical staff moved as a unit, whisking my baby out of the room before I even had a chance to see what he looked like.
My arms were still outstretched. They felt so… empty.
The rush of powerful feelings dampened and died, curling inward and curdling into sickness. My child was yanked away from me, and I’d never get this moment back. Whatever spring of new life that had arisen within my heart decayed into a cold and harsh wind. I expected to experience a surge of love so strong, it made me feel like all other types of love were inadequate, that this was what I’d been waiting for my entire life. I waited for the one thing that validated my existence and made living worthwhile. After all, that’s what everyone had told me to expect from the experience of becoming a parent.
I felt nothing. People were poking and prodding at me, but I was dissociating so badly I couldn’t register what they were doing. I wished they would all leave me here to die.
“Get out of my way!” I heard Kallie yell as she entered the room, shouldering her way through doctors and nurses and refusing to let anyone stop her. Charlie numbly stood in her way— Kallie pushed him aside, roughly shoving him into the wall like he was nothing more than an obstacle in her desperate path to get to me. “Ava! Are you okay?”
No. I wasn’t okay. This was my fault. I didn’t notice I was pregnant, and I didn’t get the right prenatal care. This baby was born two months early because I’d been ignorant. Now he might die, and his death would be on my hands. I knew my whole life I’d be a terrible mother, and I was proving it on the first day of my child’s life.
The doctors knew it, too. They knew I was a monster that couldn’t be saved. That’s why they’d taken him from me as quickly as they could.
The truth was a poison, but one I eagerly drank all the same, because it was my penance. If this baby was going to stay alive, he had to be as safe as possible.
Which meant he needed to be kept far away from me.
Chapter Fifteen
CHARLIE
A baby.
Ava and I had made a baby.
This had all happened so suddenly. I couldn’t wrap my head around it. I sat in the hallway outside the labor room, knees curled to my chest and fingers tangled in my hair. I tugged on the strands, but no matter how hard I pulled, I failed to sense the pain I expected… no— needed to feel.
I had to feel something, because right now, I was wholly detached from my body. The distant sounds of hospital staff down the hall seemed muffled, and the solid floor beneath me didn’t register. I wasn’t sure there was conversation coming from the labor room, because I couldn’t process any of it. Sophia, Kallie, and Oberi were in there, and I was alone in the hall trying to stay out of the way.
It was for the best. They could comfort Ava better than I could. She’d given everything she had to give birth to our baby, and I’d done nothing to help. Any aid I’d supplied meant little to nothing, because it couldn’t compare to everything Ava had done to bring this baby to life.
It didn’t make sense how things could change this quickly. We’d fought as hard as we could, yet the Warden had still ended up with the keys, and now we’d returned home to… this. It felt like I’d left my own reality and stepped into someone else’s life, because this couldn’t be the same world I’d been living in yesterday.
It didn’t matter how hard I tried to make sense of it. Between the sound of Ava’s frightened pleas as she asked for Luana to give her the baby, and Kallie storming into the labor room to shove me aside to get to her, I’d felt the last bits of what I’d been holding on to crumble.
I didn’t even know where the kid was right now. They’d rushed my son away without letting me hold him, without telling me why.
My son. Ancestors, if anything was going to break me, it would be this. I’d had zero time to get prepared for the idea of being a father, and I’d become one in a matter of hours. Ava was the only person who knew how this situation felt, because she’d become a mother in the same amount of time. But I couldn’t talk to her about it, comfort her, or even be in the same room so we could get through this together, because despite those papers still sitting unsigned in my drawer, we were basically no longer married. This wasn’t fucking fair.
I pulled harder on my hair until several strands broke free… and still felt nothing. I thought I might be rocking back and forth, but I couldn’t be sure. How much time had passed? I had no fucking clue.
