Chapter 38
Lisa
As Jennie's breathing slows and evens out, her body relaxes against mine. An occasional shudder still ripples through her, but even that stops as she sinks deeper into sleep.
I should sleep too. I haven't closed my eyes since the night before Jennie's birthday—which means I've been awake for over forty-eight hours.
Forty-eight hours that count among the worst of my life.
We survived. Everything will be all right. We'll soon go back to normal. My reassurances to Jennie ring hollow in my ears. I want to believe my own words, but the loss is too fresh, the agony too sharp.
A child. A baby that was part me and part Jennie. It should've been nothing, just a bundle of cells with potential, but even at ten weeks, the tiny creature had made my chest overflow with emotion, twisting me around its minuscule, barely formed finger.
I would've done anything for it, and it hadn't even been born.
It died before it had a chance to live.
Dark, bitter fury chokes me again, this time directed solely at myself. There are so many things I could've—should've—done to prevent this outcome. I know it's pointless to dwell on it, but my exhausted brain refuses to let it go. The useless what-ifs keep spinning round and round, until I feel like a hamster in a wheel, running in place and getting nowhere. What if I'd kept Jennie on the estate? What if I'd gotten to the bathroom faster? What if, what if . . . My mind spins faster, the void looming underneath me once more, and I know if I didn't have Jennie with me, I'd tumble into madness, the emptiness swallowing me whole.
Tightening my grip on her small, warm body, I stare into the darkness, desperately wishing for something unattainable, for an absolution I don't deserve and will never find.
Jennie sighs in her sleep and rubs her cheek on my chest, her soft lips pressing against my skin. On a different night, the unconscious gesture would've turned me on, awakening the lust that always torments me in her presence. Tonight, however, the tender touch only intensifies the pressure building in my chest.
My child is dead.
The stark finality of it hits me, smashing through the shields numbing me since childhood. There's nothing I can do, nothing anyone can do. I could annihilate all of Chicago, and it wouldn't change a thing.
My child is dead.
The pain rushes up uncontrollably, like a river cresting over a dam. I try to fight it, to hold it back, but it just makes it worse. The memories come at me in a tidal wave, the faces of everyone I've lost swimming through my mind. The baby, Ruby, Sorn, my mother, my father as he had been during those rare moments when I loved him . . . The surge of grief is overwhelming, crowding out everything but awareness of this new loss.
My child is dead.
The anguish sears through me, excruciating but somehow purifying too.
My child is dead.
Shaking, I hold on to Jennie as I stop fighting and let the pain in.