Chapter 69
69
TEGAN
Tia Marie Werner.
Five pounds eight ounces.
And absolutely perfect.
I cradle my newborn daughter in my arms, staring down at her impossibly tiny face. She had a brief stay in the neonatal ICU, but they have cleared her to spend her days in my own hospital room, now on the maternity ward. And I spend most of the time just staring at her and thinking about how lucky I am.
After all, I came perilously close to losing her. Twice.
How could a human being be this small? Her entire foot is about the size of one of my toes. Her nose is the size of a little tiny button. And her eyelids are paper thin, almost translucent. Every time she takes a breath, it’s like a little miracle.
“You did it, Little Tuna,” I tell her. It’s going to be difficult making the transition from calling her Tuna to calling her Tia. “You got born. That’s going to be the hardest thing you’ll ever have to do. It’s all easy from here.”
Tia blinks up at me with her clear blue eyes. She doesn’t look like she quite believes me, but that’s okay, because it’s a damn lie.
Ever since Tia’s birth, I haven’t heard her talking to me in my head anymore. The baby voice went away entirely. But when I look at her tiny face, I know what she’s thinking. Even though the umbilical cord got cut, we still share a connection that we’ll have forever.
After all, she was the only other person with me down in that basement.
It’s hard not to keep thinking about those days I spent down in Hank and Polly’s basement, even though I’ve told the police that I can’t remember any of it due to the knock on my head. It’s ironic that I’m pretending not to remember something that I’ll carry around with me for the rest of my life. Detective Maxwell has given me his personal cell phone number, and a dozen times a day, I pick up the phone to call him and tell him what happened. But I never make the call. I still haven’t given anyone their names or admitted what they did to me.
There’s a rap at the door to my hospital room, and I know who it is before I even hear the familiar voice behind the door: “Tegan?”
“Come in,” I call out.
After a brief hesitation, the door swings open, and Jackson is standing there, like he has every day since I’ve been in the hospital. He’s wearing his same rumpled dress shirt, and his eyes look tired behind his glasses. But he’s got a smile on his face.
I haven’t left the hospital since I was admitted for sepsis, and Jackson has been practically the only person who has come to visit me. My parents are gone, the father of my child is in jail, and so is my brother, both awaiting trial. So it’s just me and Tia. But every evening, Jackson is here.
“Tegan,” he says. “How are you doing?”
“Good,” I say. “Tia drank a whole bottle.”
I always wanted to breastfeed my daughter, but with the number of medications circulating in my bloodstream, it’s safer not to. I try not to focus on it though. What’s important is that she’s healthy and happy.
“I brought you something.” He pulls out a pink teddy bear he had been hiding behind his back. He holds it up to show me. “Tia’s first teddy bear!”
I laugh because the teddy bear is almost as big as she is. It seems like every day, Jackson shows up with a new surprise for us. He is desperate to make it up to me for not believing me when I first told him what Simon did. I don’t know how I could have ever thought he would hurt me.
“Also,” he says as he settles into the chair by my bed, “I’m making arrangements for when you get home.”
“Arrangements?”
He nods. “You’re going to need a lot of help given that you’ve got a new baby and you’re still healing. So I’m booking a physical therapist to come to your apartment every day, and I’ve got a list of nannies and housekeepers that I’m interviewing.”
My face flushes, and I hold Tia close to my chest. “I can’t afford that.”
“Yes, you can,” he says firmly. “I talked with Simon, and he has signed papers to pay you child support starting immediately.”
My mouth falls open. “How did you get him to do that?”
One corner of his lips quirks up. “I am very persuasive. Meaning I have access to a lot of dirt about him that would make his case even worse. And it’s already bad enough.”
I don’t want to know the other dirt about Simon Lamar. What he did to me is bad enough. I’ll always hate him for it, although I recognize that if not for him, I wouldn’t have this tiny little miracle bundled in my arms. It’s complicated, to say the least.
Jackson picks up the pink teddy bear and places it on the dresser across the room, which, like the rest of the room, is covered with flowers from what seems to be pretty much every person I’ve ever sat down next to over the course of my life. Jackson lingers at the dresser for a moment, smiling down at something. “Hey,” he says. “You already have a teddy bear.”
“I do?”
He lifts up a brown teddy bear clutching a red heart. There’s a little card strung around the teddy bear’s wrist. He opens it up and reads, “Dear Tegan, I wish you and your daughter all the happiness in the world. Love, Polly.”
I freeze, my heart sinking into my stomach. Polly .
She sent me a gift.
“Cute teddy bear.” He looks up to smile at me. “Who is Polly?”
I open my mouth, but no words come out. This is the perfect opportunity to tell him everything. To tell him how that evil woman kept me hostage in her basement for four nights while I begged to go to the hospital. How she nearly cost me and my baby our lives. How she is sick and deserves to be locked up, maybe forever.
But somehow, I can’t say any of that.
Hank pulled me out of my car when it was stuck in the snow. If he hadn’t done that, I would have frozen to death. And if Polly hadn’t prevented Dennis from injecting morphine into my bloodstream, I would have stopped breathing.
If not for Hank and Polly, Tia and I wouldn’t be here right now. And that’s worth something.
That’s worth everything.
I gaze down at my daughter’s face. What do you think, Tia? What should I do? And as always, I don’t get an answer anymore. She just stares up at me with her big, trusting eyes. This absolutely perfect baby who I almost didn’t get to hold in my arms, if not for that woman and her husband.
“Tegan?” Jackson says.
“I don’t know who Polly is,” I finally say. “I never heard the name before in my life.”