Chapter Fourteen
RYAN
TWO MONTHS LATER
“Someone, please help us! There’s so much blood! Fuck, there’s so much blood.” Trapped behind the steering wheel and the air bag, I had never felt more helpless. Hours of training couldn’t help me. I had failed her.
“Amber?” I croaked. But she didn’t respond. And there was so much blood . Her blood. My wife’s fucking blood .
A loud siren-like sound rang through the air, filling my ears. My head felt heavy, and every sudden movement was piercing me with pain. But I had to get to her. I had to get us out.
She was going to die if I didn’t do something. My wife was going to die a mere two and a half months after we got married, and it was all going to be my fault.
“Amber, open those pretty eyes, baby. Goddammit, open those green eyes.” I hit the steering wheel that was pressing firmly into my chest and grunted in pain as it vibrated against what felt like broken ribs. Everything hurt .
“Help! Please help!” My desperate pleas sounded foreign to my own ears. What happened to the other driver? The fucker had t-boned us, hitting Amber’s side after running a red light. And we’d crashed into a pole from the impact.
If she didn’t wake up, I was going to kill him with my bare fucking hands. I was nothing without her. Nothing else mattered. I’d happily rot in a prison cell to avenge her death.
Reaching for her, I inhaled deeply through the pain, forcing my fingers to wrap around her wrist. I needed to touch her, needed to feel her skin, to feel for a pulse.
She wasn’t dead. She couldn’t be. Life wasn’t that cruel. It had only been two and a half months since the wedding—two and a half fucking months—and I had already failed to keep her safe.
My fingers brushed against her inner wrist, and sticky moisture touched my fingertips. Swallowing past the vomit, I firmly pressed two fingers against her pulse and held my breath. And then, I felt it—a weak but constant drumming. She was alive . She hadn’t left me yet. That fucker hadn’t taken her from me.
“Amber, wake up. Please wake up. I love you, baby.” I shook her gently, and she moaned softly, the sound so quiet against the loud traffic and ringing in my ears. “That’s it, baby. Fight for me,” I begged her. “I need you to fight, baby. Stay with me.” Her body flinched against my touch, and I pulled back my hand to see it covered in thick, red blood. My stomach roiled.
Fuck.
“Ryan.” Her voice wavered, her tone weak. I reached for her hand, needing to feel her, to reassure her. Her fingers loosely wrapped around my hand, and she moaned again, louder this time. “Sore,” she groaned, confused. “Hurts.”
“I’m here,” I told her. “Stay awake, spitfire. Help is coming.” I fucking prayed help was coming. We’d been hit in the middle of an intersection. How long did it take for paramedics to arrive? Why hadn’t we gotten help yet?
“It hurts,” she mumbled, unmoving, and my heart stilled.
“Where, Ames?” I had to keep her talking, but with every passing second, my eyes were growing heavy. I knew hers had to be, too. We needed to stay awake.
“Every—” She paused and went silent.
“Spitfire?” I pushed through the fog in my mind, trying to turn my head to look at her, but the slight movement paralyzed me with pain. “Stay with me, Ames.” My voice was croaky and full of tears. Full of fear. “Just a little bit longer.”
There was no response. Panic settled deep into my bones. I couldn’t lose her, not after everything we had gone through. Till death do us part couldn’t come so fucking early, could it?
“Help me, please! My wife … please, help me!” I shouted, my throat raw from the exertion. And then, suddenly, there were voices, sirens, footsteps crunching on broken glass. Help had finally arrived.
It was on that Sunday afternoon that my life changed. A moment of laughter, screaming to the lyrics of our favorite song, had turned into something ugly, a memory I never wanted to remember.
Everything fucking fell apart.
TWO HOURS LATER
I stared up at the white ceiling in shock. My wife—my once healthy, normal wife—was lying on an operating table, and I was stuck here, confined to this cot.
A fucking drunk driver had taken so much from me. From us.
“Your wife was pregnant.”
I ran over the conversation with the doctor in my head for a third time. She had been pregnant… almost five months with a little girl. And now, that life was taken away. I fisted the sheets at my sides, anger rolling off of me in waves. A life had been lost, and for what reason? Because some asshole couldn’t be responsible?
Amber was going to be devastated .
Celine paced at the foot of my bed, her arms wrapped around her growing stomach. Dried, black tear streaks were illuminated on her cheeks under the harsh light. Ace sat in a chair next to me, watching Celine with worry. My parents were out of town, and right now, Amber’s whole family was waiting to board a plane to come here and see how I had failed to protect her.
“She’s been pregnant since before the wedding with my niece,” Celine muttered. Pausing, she threw her head back and looked at the ceiling, blinking furiously to keep back her tears. “Why did you do this to her?” she wailed, pure agonizing pain ripping from her throat.
Ace hurriedly stood and walked over to her. He planted himself behind her quaking form and wrapped his arms around her big, swollen belly. “She’s still alive, princess. Still breathing. That’s all we can ask for right now.” He glanced at me, blue eyes dark with sympathy.
I was confined to the bed with three broken ribs, a concussion, and a broken leg, while my wife had suffered a broken neck, broken right arm, and a piece of the car had been impaled into her uterus, killing our child, all because of a drunk driver.
“I need to see her.” The pair looked at me, so lost in grief for my child. “Ace, get me a wheelchair. I need to be there waiting.”
“The doctor said to wait, man. She’s in safe hands,” he reminded me, but I didn’t care. My wife fucking needed me.
“If it was Celine, nothing would stop you. Now, get me a fucking wheelchair and take me to see my fucking wife.” Celine sank down on the corner of my bed and wept, her body trembling with tears as Ace stormed out, slamming the door shut behind him.
“She’s going to be devastated, Ry… absolutely destroyed.” Looking at the woman my little sister turned into scared me sometimes. It was hard to believe she had experienced a miscarriage before, and now, my Amber, my spitfire, would know that same pain.
“We’ll try again,” I muttered, looking away from her.
“You don’t understand,” she sniffled. “She’s not going to be okay after this, Ryan. It almost ended mine and Ace’s marriage,” she confessed. My chest squeezed at the mere thought of losing Amber. Of her leaving me. It hurt so damn much, for a moment, I couldn’t force my lungs to work. “As a woman, you feel like a failure, like you couldn’t do something so mundane as keep your own child alive. Every day, I worry that I’m going to lose this little one. If I do, it’ll be the end of me, Ryan. I’ve lost too many.” I looked at her and saw a broken woman trying to keep glued together the pieces that were trying so desperately to peel away.
“How many, Cece?” She and Ace had been quiet about their personal affairs, never mentioning anything about a divorce and only one miscarriage.
“Four.” Ace’s deep voice filled the silence. He propped open the door with his foot and pushed the wheelchair in. “Once the shock wears off, and you know that she’s okay, you’ll feel it, too—the deep sense of failure. She won’t come to you either. She’ll turn away from you and keep everything to herself. But you can’t let her. If you do, she’ll self-destruct. You have to invade her space, remind her every hour that you love her.” He looked at my sister, pure love shining in his eyes. He settled a hand on her shoulder.
“I did fail her,” I muttered, looking at the two of them. “I vowed to keep her safe, and now, look where we are.”
“You didn’t fail her, Ryan.” Celine jumped from her spot and came to sit next to me. She leaned down to hug me and squashed me with her big belly. I bit back a grunt of pain. “God has a plan for you both. You just have to heal with each other first.”
“I just need to know she’s okay,” I said when she pulled back from me. “I need to see her.”
A nurse in bright pink scrubs came into the room then. “Mr. Wilson, I’ve been asked to give you the choice of being in the room for the stillbirth.” She didn’t meet my eyes, uncomfortably glancing around the room.
Stillbirth.
My stomach churned.
“Is she awake?” I choked on my words.
“No, sir. We had to operate on her to remove the piece in her abdomen. But we’ll be waking her shortly and giving her the option of holding the baby as protocol.” There was protocol for twisted shit like this?
“Go, Ryan.” I shook my head at Celine, suddenly overcome with sadness and pain and anger and guilt. I was a fucking mess.
“I can’t see this. I can’t see our child dead. What will she think of me?” I sank into the pillows, my heart racing at the thought. I had seen enough death. I didn’t need to see this, too. I would never recover.
“You’ll never forgive yourself if you don’t. Go. Hold her. Take a picture. Amber will need you.” Ace helped me into the wheelchair that the young nurse then pushed through the halls until we were in the maternity ward. She wheeled me through two big double doors labeled ‘Operating’. She paused outside the room to stand in front of me.
“This is going to be disturbing. You need to prepare yourself, Mr. Wilson. They will be in the process of waking your wife, and she’s going to find out now that she’s having a stillbirth to a child that she didn’t know about. Are you ready?”
As if anyone could ever be fucking ready for shit like that. I nodded, swallowing the lump in my throat as she wheeled me into a pink room, where my beautiful wife was lying on a bed, her red hair tucked beneath a blue cap on her head, her body covered by a sheet.
A doctor in blue scrubs came over to me, a surgical mask covering his mouth. “She’ll be fully awake in the next thirty minutes. Do you want me to tell her the news or you?” The surgical mask over his face slightly muffled his words, making it difficult to hear him.
I swallowed thickly. “I’ll do it. Just get me closer to her.”
“We’ll give you two some time to talk, and then, we’ll need to proceed.” He rounded up the nurses and left the room, closing the door with a muted thud.
I had been wheeled to the side of Amber’s bed, where I instantly grabbed her hand in mine and traced the soft skin of her arm, reminding myself that she was alive, that she was okay. We would be okay… somehow. We had to be.
Thirty minutes passed quickly with her becoming more alert with every passing minute. “Ryan…” Her soft voice echoed in the small room.
“Hey, baby.” I caressed her face, tracing her lips with my thumb.
“Where are we? What happened?” Her voice was croaky from sleep.
“We were in a car accident earlier today. A drunk driver hit us at an intersection and hurt you pretty badly. They’ve had to operate on you, but you won’t feel it until later when the medicine wears off. I have to tell you something,” I drew in a deep breath, pain slicing through my chest, “and I’m so fucking sorry, baby.”
“Oh, God, did I lose a leg? An arm?” she mumbled, closing her eyes. I wanted to laugh, but I couldn’t find it in me—not now, not when I knew in a minute, she was going to be crying. Falling apart.
“No, baby. I’m sorry to do this to you…” I paused, sending up a silent prayer that she would forgive me one day.
“Tell me, Ryan,” she begged me, her green eyes opening, observing me, absolutely captivating.
“You’re pregnant, but the baby didn’t survive the crash.” Fuck, that didn’t come out right. The sheer panic in her eyes told me I was already fucking this up.
“Pregnant? Me?” she questioned.
“Five months, baby,” my voice was too raw, “and now, you have to have a stillbirth.”
She stared at me for a moment as she comprehended my words. Then, her eyes filled with tears. “No! You’re lying! No, Ryan!” she screamed, tears forming in her green eyes.
“I wish I was.” I swallowed thickly, wishing I could take away all of this pain I caused her and make it my own. I never wanted her to go through this. I hated myself for it. For not protecting her better. For not being more aware of my surroundings. “I wish I could take this all away. I’m so sorry.” I reached for her, needing to pull her into my arms, but she pushed me away.
“They must be wrong. It must be alive. It has to be,” she pleaded, tears rushing down her cheeks. I shook my head, feeling my own tears falling down my face. They burned against my skin.
“It’s a girl,” I whispered.
“No!” she wailed, hitting my chest. Pain vibrated through my whole body, but I stayed still. I was trained to endure pain. She could hurt me all she wanted, as long as it made her feel better.
“Why do I have to be awake for this?” she sobbed. “Why did you wake me?” she cried, ripping my heart in two as her tortured cries and screams filled the room.
“We get to hold her,” I tried placating her, but it didn’t work. She just shook her head, her red hair coming lose from the cap. She opened her mouth to speak, but a sound of raw pain came out instead, and she just wailed, slicing my heart in two.
I held her in my arms until the doctor came back with the nurses. “Unfortunately, it’s time, Mr. and Mrs. Wilson.”
The sound that ripped from Amber’s throat tore the remaining part of my soul completely in half.
“Do you want to hold her?” the doctor asked an hour later. Amber had cried enough tears to fill a small swimming pool, and I hadn’t held back either. The salty taste of my tears was a reminder on my lips of how much I’d cried. I nodded, and they walked over to me with the tiny, still forming baby, small enough to fit in the palm of my hand.
I held my breath as I took in her lifeless face and saw a perfect, beautiful, little girl in my hands, just like her mother. Our first baby girl hadn’t even had a chance to live. And it was my fucking fault.
“Ames?” She looked at me with big, watery eyes, her lips trembling. Her blotched cheeks were highlighted by the trails of tears and sweat shining on her forehead. She was still the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen, even broken and shattered and too pale.
She took our baby girl into her hands and wept. “Oh, God, why? Oh, God,” she cried, her finger tracing the tiny curve of our baby’s nose. “She’s beautiful,” she sobbed. I put a hand on her leg, and she flinched instantly, pain flashing in her eyes. I removed my hand, hating that within a few moments, I had managed to destroy my spitfire.
“Would you like to name her?” the doctor asked, watching us with no emotion. I knew what it was like—to have to separate yourself from the situation at hand. I looked at Amber, knowing this was her call.
“Angel Wilson,” she whispered, looking at the doctor before her eyes cast back down to the baby.
My throat bobbed as I swallowed, staring at our sweet baby girl.
I’m so sorry, Angel.