A/N: This is a prequel to my story Shattered Pieces – it'll be in around five parts, depending on what people think! For those who haven't read that story and feel no need to, all you need to know is that Hanna was raped and never told Caleb what really happened. He discovered a pregnancy test, and accused her of cheating on him which she never denied, thus he left for Europe and Hanna stayed behind in New York. This story is going to follow Henry and Hanna throughout their lives together pre-Rosewood, so please, please let me know what you think!
"In the tunnel where I was raped, a tunnel that was once an underground entry to an amphitheatre, a place where actors burst forth from underneath the seats of a crowd, a girl had been murdered and dismembered. I was told this story by the police. In comparison, they said, I was lucky..." - Alice Sebold
With Caleb gone, Hanna found herself spending much of her time curled up in bed with an arm wrapped around her stomach, tears running down her face. Her eyes were sore and red, her throat raw and every part of her body ached with this dull pain she couldn't shift. As though something just had to remind her that she was still there, even when she didn't want to be. With Caleb gone, she didn't have to pretend as though everything was fine anymore because there was nobody around she had to pretend to. Luckily, it was the summer break before another year at college, and she knew she could survive off her Europe savings for at least long enough for her to pull herself from the deep depression she had found herself in.
Finally, she moved to lay on her back and rested a hand on her stomach – she was pregnant. She was going to have a baby and the father was not the person she had longed for it to be. If Caleb had been the dad, she could imagine how her life would have been; her head turned and she gave a small, sad smile as she looked at where he used to lay. His hand would be on her stomach, a silly smile on his face as he spoke about what they were going to do when their baby came, what they would name him or her, if he would prefer a girl or a boy first, about all the other children they were going to have. He would have been stressing about upping his hours at work so they could save for a bigger, a better apartment and he would be asking for a raise so they could raise a baby whilst she was still a college student.
They could have been happy, smiles on both of their faces as they just imagined what the mini them would be like. They had discussed names once and Caleb had said he liked the name Evelyn for their future daughter which meant they had Evie Rose and Amelia Grace Rivers for the two daughters they planned on having, and then Henry Thomas Rivers for their son. She wondered how angry he would be if she named her child either Evie or Henry, if he would hate the idea of her using the names they had decided on together. Her eyes closed tightly and she held back a sob before she moved back onto her side and wrapped her arms around the pillow Caleb once rested his head upon. She could still smell him, she could practically see him laying there, shirtless and smirking. She missed him, she missed everything about him and yet, she would never get him back because he was gone. And she was left to raise the child of a rapist on her own.
It took two weeks until she managed to crawl out of bed for the first time for something other than the odd glass of water or some sort of food to keep her going before she crawled back into her bed and again, mourned everything she had lost. It was the first time she had let the fresh air hit her face, her hand wrapped around the warm cup of coffee she held as she just walked through the streets of New York. Her breathing got heavy when she passed a dark corner, of an alley that could potentially be the one she had been dragged into, or worse, it could happen again. She didn't leave the apartment again for three weeks after that, and instead she would sit near the window and stare out at the streets she was missing out on, wondering if she could ever be normal again. Her hand kept falling onto her growing bump and she felt nothing but a mixture of sorrow and complete loss – she wondered if she was, at this point, completely lost. She had been forced down a path she had never wanted to take and she didn't know how she could turn back and get to where she needed and wanted to be.
Despite fact she was twenty-four weeks pregnant, Hanna had yet to see her baby on the screen she had heard so many mothers rambling on and on about. She had heard stories about how they had seen their babies for the first time and how elated they had been, how amazing it had been to see that life growing inside of them. Hanna had just avoided it; she had gone back to college, focused on classes whilst she avoided people and forced a smile when they congratulated her. She didn't see what she had to be congratulated on, but she was good at playing pretend, she could pretend to be the doting, good mother that the world thought she was meant to be. She didn't mention that Caleb was gone, she didn't mention that her life was over.
Somehow, she managed to find herself in the doctors office though, enduring lectures about how she should have come sooner but she only shrugged it off as she stared down at her huge bump. It just seemed to grow every single day, as though it was taunting her. The love of her life couldn't get her pregnant but one night with the man who haunted her nightmares? Well, that seemed to do it. She was being laughed at, taunted in every single way possible and she had no idea how much hate she could possibly have for the life growing inside of her. Whatever it was or however it looked, could she really bring it up right?
Tears fell down her face only twenty minutes later when she stared at the screen and was told she was expecting a baby boy. Maybe she could have learned to love it if it turned out to be a girl – maybe she could have learned how to bring her up, how to separate it from the man she hated so much. But she was having a boy – would he grow up to be like his father? Would he look like him? Would it be ingrained within him? Would she ever be able to look at him, or hold him without seeing what had happened?
That scan was the first and only time she saw that little boy on the screen, the first time she watched the way he moved, the way his tiny body turned in her stomach and how he seemed to be waving at her as though he really, really wanted her to love him. She didn't think it was possible to ever love something that came from him. She would see it in his eyes, she would see it in how he was when he got older. Maybe adoption was still an option but for some reason, that thought terrified her, that she would bump into him one day or she would see his face on the news as a wanted criminal when he was in his twenties and she would just know it was him. Or maybe he would go looking for her and she would have to tell him why she gave him up, and he would pretend to understand but he would hate her. If she went at the rate she was going, even if she did bring him up, he would hate her anyway. That thought didn't hit her with the overwhelming loss she had felt when she realised Caleb hated her, but she wished it would.
Once she had gotten home, she brought a pillow to her face and screamed into it, wishing she could rip him right out of her and forget the entire thing ever happened. Why didn't she have an abortion whilst she could? Why didn't she take the morning after pill? Why did it ever happen at all? There were so many things she could have changed, so many things she should have done that would have prevented her from being in the situation she was in right then but then she reminded herself – she hadn't taken the morning after pill because she had been so in shock, she could barely move, she had struggled to get herself out of bed the next morning before she spent an hour sobbing in the shower. She hadn't had an abortion because she couldn't bring herself to do it, she had even tried, she had booked an appointment but she hadn't been able to leave the apartment and she wasn't able to convince herself in time that she wanted to kill the baby that was growing inside of her. She let out another scream at the thought and sobbed as hard as she could, until she cried herself to sleep.
She wished she could have said that she was shocked when she went into labour seven weeks earlier than planned. She hadn't been looking after herself or the baby inside of her – she barely ate enough to feed one, let alone two and she found it difficult to move out of bed most of the time. She managed to get through college, although she had no idea why or how because energy seemed like a thing of the distant past. She had to turn up to the hospital, on her own, after sending her mother and nobody else a text stating she had gone into labour but she would be fine, the baby would be fine. And if he wasn't, would she care? Not that she would ever be able to say those words out loud, she wasn't done pretending to the world that she was fine because as far as they were concerned, she was nothing more than the person who had cheated on her boyfriend and had ended up pregnant with another man's baby. She had kept that lie going, told people who asked that that man had turned out to want nothing to do with her or the baby. She could lie as much as she needed to in order to keep the people in the dark about what had really happened.
Hanna would be lying if she said the thought hadn't crossed her mind more than once – the thought that involved her walking out of there and leaving her son behind in the Intensive Care Unit. When he was born, he had been so tiny, so helpless, so vulnerable and she wondered if he would be better off without her. As she sat next to the incubator that housed her tiny baby, she averted her eyes to the other families in the room – she watched the hopeful looks on their faces, she had seen parents crying and then she had seen them sobbing when they were told that any hope they did have, was gone. It made her feel sick when she watched them because she envied them in a way that she never should have done; she had a precious baby boy and maybe she should have been proud and happy but instead, she was willing for him to join those other babies who could have been loved and happy because she couldn't give him the life he would have needed.
She didn't shed a tear, the nurses and doctors tried to convince her that it was just the shock of the situation but she knew it went deeper than that. She was just staring at this tiny baby and it felt as though she was looking at a stranger, a complete and utter stranger because there was nothing there. She didn't love him, and she wasn't sure she even wanted to love him. She watched as other mothers so desperately sought to wrap their arms around their babies, so happy when they finally got to hold them and instead, the first time he was placed in her arms, she just looked down at him wondering what the hell she had done. His hair was blonde, his eyes were blue, her mother said he looked like she did the more he grew but all she could see was the person who had held her against the wall that night and shoved her into the depths of hell. Now that he was born and she was meant to love him, she felt the darkness wrapping around her, enveloping her completely until she had no idea who she was anymore. She was meant to be a mother but she felt the furthest thing from it when she looked down at that baby and thought of all the ways she could have stopped this from happening.
People came to visit her and the little boy who got stronger and stronger with each passing day – the doctors called him a miracle, stating that he was going beyond anything they could have expected from a baby so premature. He was breathing on his own after two weeks, he could take his own food just a week after that, his jaundice was near gone, and he was starting to regulate his own body temperature. He was exceeding expectations and all she felt was pure jealousy when she watched someone else walk away and go back to their own lives. Her mother came and went, coming back to New York every so often to make sure that Hanna was doing okay, and then all of her friends visited before they had to leave to go back to their perfect lives. She was jealous, beyond jealous, she was completely envious that they were happy and she was stuck. Stuck in that hospital as she waited for someone to tell her that the son she never wanted was well enough to leave.
It was only the times that she was completely alone that she allowed herself to cry and mourn everything she had lost. Her arms wrapped around herself and her head hidden in her knees as she thought about the life she could have had. After everything A or Charlotte had done to them, they deserved to be happy and she should have had that, she should have had that for longer than three years. In those darker moments, she even considered how she would have preferred to be locked in the dollhouse – nothing like that would have happened to her there, she would have been deeply traumatised but at least her best friends, her mother and the person she loved wouldn't think she was a cheat and she wouldn't be forced to bring up a child she hated.
They made her hold him, told her how she needed to hold his head, how she should try breastfeeding again because breast was best. They would try and make her feel guilty but it was as though her body completely shut down, her body had already betrayed her once and now it was just continuing with it. Although it wasn't much of a betrayal, she didn't want that close to him anyway. The best thing about the hospital had been the fact that the nurses or the doctors seemed to do most of the work, they would feed him when she couldn't, they would change him, they would check on him, they would do everything that she would struggle to do. But then, the best thing about being home was that there was no one to watch and judge her on how she was around her son. She didn't have to hold him if she didn't want to, she could feed him formula milk if she chose to, she could throw a pillow over her head when he cried at night and ignore him.
Even after a week of being home, it seemed as though he knew he was unloved. He settled into his own routine, one that didn't include crying at night; most people moaned about how their babies took so long before they slept through the night but instead, Henry seemed to pick up on the mood straight away. Mommy wasn't going to get him and hug him when he cried and so, she managed to sleep through the night, only awoken by the nightmares that haunted her every night. And then she would wake up and move to his crib, staring down at his sleeping figure with a pillow in her hand. Her heart would thump against her chest and she would grip onto the fabric, just staring at his sleeping form before she would take a step back and move towards her bed, moving the pillow over her own face as she wished she could suffocate herself.
The only time she would hold him was when someone else was around, and it felt uncomfortable and he knew something was wrong. He'd cry, even when she held him, only to stop when he was wrapped in the arms of someone else; anyone else. He loved her mother, he'd snuggle into Ashley's chest and his fingers would curl around her hair and he would fall asleep quickly and easily. Both of them had a mutual agreement that they would be together because they had to (well, she supposed, as much of a mutual agreement as a six week old could have), and not because they wanted to. Every single time that Hanna thought about it, she knew she should have done the right thing and she should have just let him go to a family who could have given him all the love he deserved. They wouldn't have to know about who his father was or how he had been conceived, they would love him for who he was and not who she thought he was going to be, or the person she related him to.
There was one night, she found herself on her laptop, typing in 'how to love my rapists baby' as though it was a perfectly normal thing to find. But she had spent hours going through the articles she had found there of the many, many women who had made the decision to keep their baby after they had been raped, but most of them told the stories of the joy they had felt when they held their child for the first time. There were women who fought for their babies no matter what had happened or how they had come into the world – they thought their children were perfect, they would describe the love and maternal affection that had come over them and she turned her head to look at the sleeping boy in his crib, wondering where those feelings were. She could list how she felt about him and none of them were the things she was seeing in front of her – she hated him because of who his father was, she was scared of him because of what he could become, she wished he would disappear more than once a day because her life would have been so much easier without him in it and most of all, she felt jealous because he had no clue how he came into the world, and he was blissfully unaware that the reason he was born was the reason she wanted to die.