Chapter 58
CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT
Ayanna
I’m standing in a room I don’t recognize.
White walls, white curtains drifting in a breeze I can’t feel, and there’s a large bed in the center and a little girl sitting on it.
Three, maybe four years old. Dark hair falling in soft waves around her face.
Her skin the color of honey and cream. And her eyes…
Her eyes are his. Pale blue, clear as a winter sky.
She looks at me with an expression that cracks my chest open and lets the cold in. Sad. She looks so unbearably sad.
I try to speak but can’t. I try to go to her, to cross the small distance between us, and my feet won’t obey. It’s like I’m rooted where I stand, reaching for something I can’t touch.
Then someone steps between us, and my heart stops.
Grandmother.
Exactly as she was before the cancer took her, when I was twelve, with silver threaded through dark hair swept back from her face. Those warm brown eyes that always saw more than I wanted them to.
She’s in white too. Like the room. Like the light. Like everything in this place that sits outside of time.
She doesn’t speak as though she can’t. Like I can’t and the girl can’t either. She only looks at me with what seems like compassion and sorrow. Then she turns, and takes the little girl’s hand, and they begin to walk away from me.
I try to follow, try to run after them, but I can’t. I’m held in place, watching, as they walk toward a darkness gathering at the far edge of the room.
The little girl looks back over her shoulder. One last glance, those pale-blue eyes finding mine.
Anabella.
I hear the name echoing around.
The dark folds over them, and I wake up crying. Tears are already streaming down my face before I’m fully conscious. My hands shake. My whole body trembles.
Anabella.
I don’t know how I know it. I only know that I do, the way you know your own name. The way you know the shape of your own hand in the dark.
Her name is Anabella.
“Ayanna—” I hear his voice. “Ayanna. I’m here. I’ve got you.”
I open my eyes and see a white ceiling, and hear a dull, distant beeping, and I feel a deep, tearing pain low in my right side. It’s like fire, like something tore through me and left wreckage behind. I try to move, and it pins me flat.
Then I glance slightly to the side and see him. Aric. He’s out of the chair and at the edge of the bed, his hands hovering like he’s afraid I’ll come apart if he holds on and afraid I’ll come apart if he doesn’t.
“Don’t,” Aric says, though his voice is different. “Don’t move. You’ll pull the stitches.”
I look at him, and the dream is still so loud in me I can’t tell yet which world is real.
“I saw her,” I whisper. “Aric, I saw her. A little girl. She had your eyes—she had your exact eyes—and my grandmother was there, and she took her hand and they—” My voice breaks. “They walked into the dark. And my grandmother told me her name. She told me her name was Anabella.”
Something happens in his face that I don’t understand. A flinch he can’t stop, deep behind the control.
I’ve seen Aric in a great many states in the months we’ve been married.
Cold. Controlled. Possessive. Tender, in the rare unguarded moments.
I have never seen him like this. Hollow.
As though someone had reached inside him and scooped out everything vital, leaving only the shape of a man behind.
There are shadows under his eyes the color of bruises.
“What happened?” My throat feels like sand. “Aric. What happened to me?”
Aric takes my hand, folds it between both of his.
“You were shot. At the gala. The bullet caught you in the abdomen, the right side.” He speaks as though he’s walking on ice he already knows is going to break.
“You lost a great deal of blood. Kirill stabilized you here. No major organ was hit. You’ll heal. ”
“How long was I—”
“Two days.”
Two days, gone to the dark. Then I remember the little girl walking into it, and something in me lurches.
“Ayanna.” He’s looking at our joined hands, not at me, and that frightens me more than anything yet, because Aric Vold does not look away. “Did you know?”
“Know what?” My brows twitch slightly, and suddenly, I realize how dry my mouth feels. How thirsty I am.
He lifts his eyes, and something is flickering in them, something I have genuinely never seen there before. Grief. Pain. Perhaps a mix of both.
“You were pregnant,” he barely manages. “Eight weeks.”
The words echo somewhere distant as though spoken in a language I half understand.
Pregnant. Were. Past tense.
And I already know before he says the rest, I know, because the dream is still pulsing behind my eyes—a little girl with his eyes, walking hand in hand into the dark, looking back at me one last time.
“Before. Did you suspect, and not—” Aric asks, and it’s the most careful I have ever heard him, like the question itself could wound me.
“No.” The word breaks in half. “No. I didn’t know. I was so busy, I thought I was just—I didn’t know, Aric, I didn’t know she was there—”
She.
His eyes close for a fraction.
“Kirill found it in your blood. After.” His voice fractures down the middle; he forces it back together with visible effort. “The trauma. The blood loss. There was nothing he could—” He lets out a breath, forcing himself to finish. “We lost the baby, Ayanna. I’m sorry.”
The world ends quietly. No sound at all. A vast white silence that swallows the pain in my side and the machines and his voice and everything that used to be in me.
She came to tell me goodbye. My grandmother brought her to me so I would have one look at her face. So I would know her name. So I would know she isn’t alone, wherever she’s gone—that she’s held, that someone who loved me is loving her now, in a place I can’t reach.
“Anabella,” I whisper, tears streaming down my temples.
“Her name was Anabella. That’s…that’s why she came.
To tell me.” My hand drifts to my side, below the bandage, to the place where she was.
“She’s with my grandmother, and my grandmother is taking care of her.
She wouldn’t leave her alone, Aric, she’d never—”
“I know.” His voice is barely a sound. His thumb moves over my knuckles like he’s anchoring himself to me as much as me to him. “Your grandmother has her, and she’s safe, and she isn’t alone. I believe that. I need you to believe it too.”
I look at him through the blur, and for one moment, something passes between us that has no words—two people standing on opposite edges of the same grave.
“I want to sleep.” I turn my head and squeeze my eyes shut against the tears.
Aric presses his mouth to the back of my hand and holds it there a long moment.
“I’ll be here when you wake,” he whispers.
I let the dark take me, and I am not afraid of it now, because my daughter walked into it, and she’s there, on the other side.
The days after blur into one long gray stretch. I sleep, and wake, and the loss is the first thing waiting for me every time, sitting patiently at the foot of the bed like it never left.
People come and go.
Vidar visited me once. He’s gotten so much worse since I first arrived here. His face is sunken, hair gone from chemo, every breath a struggle. He talks about strength. About how a setback is not a tragedy if you don’t let it become one.
“It was very early,” he rasps. “Barely anything at all. You didn’t even know. It isn’t as though you lost a child, Ayanna.”
I’m not sure whether his intention was to comfort me or smash me, but something in me, far down under the numbness, stings.
I don’t argue with him. I don’t have it in me.
But when the door closes behind him, tears escape on their own.
I lost a child, and no voice on earth will make that smaller than it is.
I was a mother for eight weeks, and her name was Anabella, and I lost a child—a child I would’ve loved with everything I have and everything I am.
A child whose voice, or laugh I’ll never know.
A child with his eyes and my hair. Half me.
Half him. The best of both, made into something new and perfect and ours.
And Vidar calls her barely anything. Then again, I wouldn’t have expected anything else from a man like him.
My parents visit me once too before they leave for Monsera. My father stands at the end of the bed in a dark suit, hands folded, and looks at me with an expression that I’ve never once seen on his face before. While my mother’s brows are creased as she sits next to me, her arms enclosed around me.
“My baby,” she whispers into my hair. “My sweet baby girl.”
I don’t cry. I think I’ve cried all the tears I have, but I hold her and let myself be held as though I’m still a child. And for one moment, I feel something like safe.
“Where is your husband?” My father’s voice cuts through the moment.
I pull back from my mother. “He had a meeting.”
“A meeting.” My father scoffs. “While his wife is barely holding on by a thread.”
“Leandro.” My mother’s voice carries a warning, but he ignores her.
“I would’ve thought, given the circumstances, he might prioritize—”
“He’s giving us space.” The words come out sharper than I intend. “That’s consideration, Father, not an insult.”
He looks at me for a moment, something like surprise in his eyes. “Of course,” he says quietly. “Forgive me. I’m merely concerned for you, habibti.”
Habibti. The endearment he hasn’t used since I was a child.
“I can’t imagine what you’re going through.
” Father runs his hand through his face.
“Losing a child… there’s no pain like it.
Nothing that prepares you for it.” His voice cracks, and he takes a deep breath.
“And to not even know you were pregnant until after…” He shakes his head slowly.
“The cruelty of it. The unfairness. It makes me want to—”
He takes a breath again as though it takes all effort in him to say those words. As though they’re stuck in his throat. And when he looks at me again, there’s something in his eyes that looks almost like… guilt?