One Day Soon (One Day Soon, #1)(49)

Brittany grinned. “Enough said. Go on back. But just so you know, Maria’s on duty. You won’t be able to actually go inside. You know what a Nazi she is about germs,” Brittany laughed.

“We just want to peek in through the window. I’ll make sure not to anger the Kraken.”

Brittany snorted and hit the button opening the double doors in front of us. “Thanks,” I said as I led Yoss down the brightly lit corridor. The doors shut behind us, closing us in. The air smelled different here. Like baby powder and something sweet. I inhaled deeply.

Yoss gave my arm a small squeeze. “You come here a lot, don’t you?”

“Yeah. Sometimes I just like to imagine how different my life could have been,” I admitted. I turned left and then stopped in front of a large window that looked into a lovely room painted in colorful swaths of blue and pink. A matronly woman with grizzled grey hair and a mole on her chin prepared a bottle at the counter, her back to us.

Yoss looked confused. “And that makes you happy? Thinking about how things should have been? How things didn’t turn out?” He seemed horrified.

I pressed my palm to the glass. “I like to remember when things seemed possible.”

I watched as Marie dabbed the formula from the bottle on the inside of her wrist before picking up a small baby swaddled in a blue blanket. He latched onto the nipple and began to drink.

Marie rocked him back and forth while he ate, patting his bottom the whole time.

My eyes drifted over to a little girl in the bassinet closest to the window. She wore a tiny pink and blue striped hat, her face scrunched up as she slept.

I felt myself smile. I couldn’t help it. Maybe I should have felt devastated standing there, staring at babies that weren’t mine.

But I wasn’t.

“You wanted me to tell you about a happy story. A true story. This is it,” I said.

Yoss glanced at me, then back at the sleeping infant. “You have a child?” He sounded surprised.

“It’s been fifteen years, Yoss, a lot happens in that amount of time,” I reminded him.

“I just didn’t think…” His words drifted off and he never finished the thought. But he was shocked. I could tell. As if he hadn’t expected me to be a mother. That hurt more than spending time with babies that could never be mine.

“No. I don’t have a child. Not now anyway,” I told him. Yoss glanced back at the baby sleeping in the crib.

“Then why—?”

“Chris and I had been married for a year,” I began, cutting him off, wanting to get the words out before I lost the nerve. “We both wanted children. It was one of the few things we ever agreed on. So we started trying to conceive. There were a lot of disappointments at first. I started to think something was wrong with me. That I wasn’t meant to have children.” My chest constricted painfully at the memory of those horrible few months when I’d get my hopes up only to have them dashed into the ground.

But then my heart lifted at what came next. “After a few months I missed my period. I started to get sick in the morning. So I took a test.” My smile grew wide. “I was pregnant.” I sounded breathless as I remembered that moment when my entire world changed.

I could still feel the joy. The hope. It was the only time Chris and I were truly happy to be together.

“I was going to be a mother. And I was going to be a good one too.” My hand that was pressed against the window curled into a fist. “I was never going to let my baby grow up feeling second best or unloved. They’d always know that they were first in my heart.”

“You would be an amazing mom, Imi. I always knew that,” Yoss said softly, but I barely heard him.

“Weeks passed and my belly got a little bigger. Not much. Just enough to start wearing bigger pants and stretchy shirts. Then the day came when we were able to find out the sex. We were having a little girl.” Breathless. Joy. So much happiness.

The baby in the bassinet began to stir, her little mouth open and closing. “We were going to name her Gabrielle. Gabby for short. I bought her pretty pink blankets and Chris put together a crib. We argued over colors for the nursery. We never could decide. Though in the end, we didn’t need to.”

“Imi—”

“For three months I was the happiest I could ever remember being. Even when I was with you, it was nothing compared to feeling Gabby growing inside of me,” I told him. Heartbeats. Excited smiles. Contentment.

I watched as Maria put one baby down and picked up the tiny girl who was now crying. I wished I could hold her. If one of the other nurses were on duty I’d be able to. But Maria wouldn’t allow it. So I’d be have to okay with watching from the outside.

“That’s my happy story, Yoss. The one that’s real.”

I felt Yoss press his shoulder into mine. “Where’s Gabby now?” His question was gentle. His words were knives.

This was the part of the story I didn’t like to think about.

“I suffered from a placental abruption at twenty-eight weeks.” Pain. So much of it. Blood. Red and dark running down my legs. Then an emptiness I never recovered from.

“I woke up one morning and I knew something was wrong. I could feel it. Just a few weeks before I had felt her move for the first time. That morning she wasn’t moving at all. And I knew. Chris rushed me here and I gave birth to our little girl.” I took a deep breath. “And then two days later we buried her.”