I stopped walking. “James.”
He looked at me. “I need you to sit down,” he said.
“Tell me why I’m here.”
“Please.”
“No.” I wouldn’t sit. I couldn’t.
He stared at the floor for a long moment. “Because there’s something I have to ask you. And I need you to hear all of it before you answer.”
My mind instantly raced to the ugliest possible conclusion. I wish I could say I trusted my husband so blindly that standing outside a maternity ward with a newborn inside didn’t trigger a sickening thought: His baby. Someone else’s baby.
I looked through the glass again at the pink blanket and the tiny hand, and my stomach dropped. “Is she yours?”
James looked genuinely shocked. “What?”
“Don’t make me ask twice.”
“No.” The answer was immediate. “No. God, no.”
I stared at him. “Then whose is she?”
He rubbed both hands over his face. “Do you remember I told you about Anna?”
The name barely registered. He had mentioned it once or twice years ago, before us—his first love from when they were twenty-two, back when they talked about a house and children before life intervened, she married someone else, and he eventually met me.
“I remember,” I said.
“I haven’t spoken to her in eleven years,” he said quickly. “Not a call, not a message, nothing. I want you to know that before I say anything else.”
My heart hammered against my ribs. “Why is she here?”
James looked toward the room. “She was.”
The past tense hit me hard. “Was?”
He nodded and began explaining it disjointedly, the way people do when a truth is too heavy to carry. Anna had been seven months pregnant when her husband abruptly left and moved away. Her mother had passed away the year before, her father had died when she was a teenager, and she had no siblings or nearby relatives.
That morning at four a.m., she went into labor, tried to drive herself to the hospital, and ultimately had to call an ambulance from a gas station. She gave birth to a healthy little girl weighing over six pounds. But Anna wasn’t healthy. Complications set in—severe bleeding followed by medical terms James couldn’t properly repeat—and she deteriorated rapidly.
