Fractured Freedom(53)

“But how? I didn’t do anything wrong,” I whispered. I’d eaten all the right foods. I’d done all the right things. I hardly even moved, I was so scared to hurt her or him.

See, I was even using pronouns.

“Sometimes this just happens. It’s not your fault. Let’s run some tests and …”

Nothing they said to me mattered after that. She’d said it wasn’t my fault as if there was room for it to be. My mind scoured over everything I’d eaten that week, everything I’d done, how I’d slept. Had I slept on my stomach and hurt the baby? Was that possible?

My baby had stopped growing at ten weeks, and that meant my body had missed expelling it. I had to have a procedure. I had to utilize medical technology to do something my body should have been able to do naturally.

I’d failed at pregnancy, and now I’d failed at miscarrying. I’d failed myself, my baby, and maybe Dante, although he’d never know.

No one would know, I told myself. I couldn’t bear to let them know of my failure.

Depression crept in, bleeding like black ink over the colorful world minute by minute, hour by hour. The bleed might have been slow or it might have been fast, but once it took over, it consumed me. Everything was dark. The weight of my worries and the negative parts of the world buried me so deep down in my soul that it seemed impossible to move.

When I miscarried that baby, I suffocated under the weight of that blackness. I hadn’t been aware of that type of pain until my own trauma.

But it halted my life, changed my path, made me into a completely different person. I didn’t take anyone’s calls. I didn’t go out when my roommate asked me to, and I didn’t reply to messages from Dante or my siblings.

Maybe I should have told them, but my family had been dealing with Izzy in juvie. Maybe I could have shared it with Dante, but he’d been fighting a war overseas. Who was I to not tell him about our baby in the first place, then burden him with my grief?

I didn’t have any energy to do anything but keep breathing.

That in and of itself was almost too much.





16





Extract the Information





Dante





There it was. That look of anguish across her face. The one I’d seen whenever we’d encountered one another back home after I took her virginity, except this time, she’d started to tell me why, and I wasn’t stopping until I found out the answer.

“Lost what, Delilah Hardy?” I ground out.

She took a breath and bit her lip, looking around. “This isn’t the place to talk about it.”

“The place is here and now. Answer me.”

“Let’s go somewhere more private.” She wrung her hands like she knew it was going to be bad.

It was. Because I could only imagine one thing she might have lost that would cause that much depression, and I was about to lose what little control I possessed around her. “Leonardo,” I barked over my shoulder to the host who’d directed us to our table, “clear the restaurant.”

He jumped into action, mumbling an, “Of course, Mr. Armanelli.”

I wasn’t paying attention to what he was doing, though. I was watching the woman across from me, how her eyes widened at my last name, how she watched the host and his employees buzz around at my one command.

Lilah didn’t understand my power, but she was about to.

“Dante,” she whispered, “you can’t … People are leaving. We can’t ruin people’s meals. Why are they listening to you?”

“Because I’m an Armanelli, Delilah. And people listen to Armanellis.”

“This is ludicrous.” She shook her head and started to stand up from her chair. “You can’t just go around commanding people.”

Leaving me without an explanation wasn’t an option anymore.

She had to know that, especially when I already knew what the answer was going to be. She needed to say it out loud, though; she needed to make it true so that I could be sure.

“Sit. Down,” the voice from deep within me bellowed.

A couple rushing past jumped at the sound.

Delilah, to her credit, didn’t jerk back, but her body instantly knew who was in charge. She plopped right back down into her seat.

“Don’t yell at me, Dante.” She mustered a scolding although she knew she had no right. “And that party trick you just pulled with all these people—it’s disrespectful.”

I chuckled at her trying to put me in my place and rubbed my jaw. That attitude would have gotten anybody else the beating of a lifetime. With her, I somehow kept it all bottled up. The rage was rattling, though, and I knew if we didn’t settle this, I was bound to pop off. “What did you fucking lose, Delilah? It’s the last time I’ll ask you.”

She shut her eyes and tucked her chin into her neck before she exhaled slowly. One breath in, one breath out. Seven times.

I counted while I breathed with her.

“Seven to heaven, right?” she said to me as she opened her eyes. They glistened with a rainbow of color—hazel and gold, brown and green—as she murmured, “Our baby went to heaven too. I lost her or him twelve weeks after we slept together.”

Silence was supposed to be my ally, the thing that brought me back from any emotion that barreled through me. It became my enemy as I sat across from her and she stared at me without another word.