13. Christine
— ? —
Christine
I’m not even fully awake when I hear it - a sound that doesn’t belong, a wrongness that pulls me from sleep like a hand around my throat.
Isabella’s breathing has changed. Not the soft, rhythmic sighs I’ve memorized over weeks of midnight feedings, not the snuffling sounds she makes when she’s dreaming.
This is different.
Wet. Whistling. Like air being pulled through a straw that’s collapsed somewhere in the middle.
I’m out of bed before my brain catches up, crossing the two steps to her bassinet, my hand already reaching for the lamp. Light floods the room, and I see her.
My daughter’s chest is caving in.
Not dramatically, not like the movies - but with every breath, the skin between her ribs sucks inward, her tiny body working harder than it should just to pull in air. And her lips. Her lips have a blue cast that I will see every time I close my eyes for the rest of my life.
Blue.
My baby’s lips are blue.
“Mom!” The word tears out of me, primal and terrified. “MOM!”
I scoop Isabella up, hold her against my chest like I can breathe for both of us, and I’m counting. Counting breaths, counting seconds, counting the space between each labored wheeze because if I’m counting I’m not panicking, if I’m counting I’m doing something, if I’m counting-
Mom appears in the doorway, her face cycling through confusion to concern to fear in the space of a heartbeat.
“Call 911,” I say, and my voice sounds like someone else’s. Calm. Controlled. Nothing like the terror screaming inside my skull. “Now. Something’s wrong with her breathing.”
Mom disappears. I hear her on the phone in the hallway, giving the address, describing symptoms I can barely process.
I sink to the floor.
Not because my legs give out - because I need to be lower, need to be closer to the ground, need to feel something solid underneath me while my entire world narrows to the small, struggling creature in my arms.
“Please,” I whisper. To God, to the universe, to whoever might be listening. “Please, please, please.”
I haven’t prayed since the delivery room. Haven’t spoken to any higher power since I begged for my husband to appear and he didn’t, since I screamed his name into an empty hospital room and got nothing but silence in return.
But I’m praying now.
I’m praying with every breath Isabella takes, matching mine to hers, willing air into her lungs through sheer force of desperation.
The paramedics arrive in what they tell me is nine minutes. It feels like nine years. They’re calm and efficient, asking questions I answer on autopilot while they check her oxygen levels and listen to her chest and exchange looks I can’t read but know aren’t good.
“We’re going to transport her,” one of them says - a woman, kind face, steady hands. “Probably RSV. It’s common in infants, but we want to get her on oxygen right away.”
RSV. I know what that is. Read about it in one of the thousand baby books I consumed during pregnancy, back when I thought knowledge could protect me from everything.
It can’t.
Nothing can.
I ride in the back of the ambulance with Isabella strapped to a board that looks too big for her, a tiny cannula taped to her impossible little face, and I hold her hand - her whole fist wrapped around my finger - and I don’t let go.
I don’t call Benedict.
The thought flickers through my mind and I dismiss it just as quickly. He wasn’t there for her birth. He doesn’t get to be there for this.
But the hospital does.
His name is still on the emergency contact form I filled out in a haze the week Isabella was born, before the divorce papers, before the letter, before everything shattered and rearranged into this new, terrible shape.
And it’s also, as it turns out, on the building.
Because of course they wheel my daughter into the Isabella Morgan Unit.
The one his money paid for. The one I found out about from a photograph.
The irony isn’t lost on me. My daughter, in the unit that carries her name, fighting for breath in the very place her father endowed with the guilt of his absence. I want to laugh. I want to scream. I do neither.
I just follow the gurney and try to keep my feet under me.
***
He arrives in twenty-two minutes.
I know the exact time because I’ve been staring at the clock on the wall, counting minutes the way I counted breaths, giving myself something to focus on besides the terror clawing at my chest.
The doors to the waiting room burst open, and there he is - Benedict Morgan, billionaire CEO, wearing a wool coat thrown hastily over what are clearly pajama pants. His hair is wild. His face is gray. He looks like he’s been running.
“Where is she?”
I stand. My legs feel like they belong to someone else. “Oxygen. They’re running a swab. They think it’s RSV.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means her airways are the size of a coffee stirrer and they’re swelling shut.”
He sits down hard in a plastic chair that’s far too small for him. Just… drops. Like someone’s cut his strings.
For a long moment, neither of us speaks. The waiting room hums around us - fluorescent lights, distant beeping, the quiet murmur of a hospital that never sleeps.
“I didn’t call you,” I say finally.
“I understand.” His voice is rough. Wrecked. “But I’m here anyway.”
The words hang between us, heavy with everything they mean and don’t mean.
I want to tell him to leave. Want to protect myself from the way his presence makes me feel - the confusing tangle of anger and relief and something else I refuse to name. But I can’t make the words come.
So I stand there, arms wrapped around myself, staring at a man who showed up in pajama pants to a hospital at 2 a.m. because his daughter was struggling to breathe.
I’ve spent weeks building a wall out of his absence. Brick by brick, silence by silence, every unanswered call and blocked number a layer of protection between me and the devastation of loving someone who wasn’t there.
Now he’s four feet away in a plastic chair, and the wall has no idea what to do with him.
He rolls his sleeves to the elbow. A small gesture, unconscious, something he does when he’s stressed and needs to feel less confined.
I can’t help noticing his forearms. The flex of muscle under skin, the light dusting of dark hair, the familiar map of veins I used to trace with my fingertips when we lay tangled together in bed.
I hate that I notice his forearms. I hate that I’m standing in a hospital waiting room, terrified for my daughter’s life, and some traitorous part of my brain is watching the way his body moves.
The breadth of his shoulders under that ridiculous coat.
The way he’s holding himself like he might shatter if he breathes wrong.
His scent reaches me without permission.
Sandalwood and sweat and something warmer underneath, something that could only be him.
It drags me under for one disorienting second.
His mouth on my throat. Fingers that knew exactly where to press.
A version of us that feels so far away now it might as well be something I invented.
Don’t, I tell myself. Stop thinking like this about him. He won’t be your husband much longer.
“You should sit down,” he says.
“I’m fine.”
“You’ve been standing for an hour.”
“I said I’m fine.”
He stands. Not toward me, just - up. Like his body can’t hold still inside itself, like the fear and guilt and helplessness are too much to contain in a seated position.
“Can I get you something? Coffee. Water. A blanket-”
“Benedict.”
“I need something to do.” His voice cracks on the last word. “Please. Let me do something.”
The desperation in his voice undoes something in me. Just a small thing, just a crack in the wall, but enough.
“Actually, a chai latte instead of coffee,” I say.
He practically runs to find it.
I sink into a chair while he’s gone, my legs finally admitting defeat.
The plastic is cold through my thin pajamas.
I didn’t think to change before the ambulance came.
Didn’t think about anything except Isabella, except that horrible whistling sound, except the blue tinge to lips that should be pink.
He returns with two cups, presses one into my hands. Our fingers brush during the transfer, and I feel it everywhere - a jolt of contact I wasn’t prepared for, a reminder of all the ways our bodies used to fit together.
We sit.
Our knees end up four inches apart, and neither of us moves. The four inches become the loudest thing in the building. I’m hyperaware of the space between us - the charged air, the magnetic pull, the careful distance we’re both pretending is natural.
“You’ve been parking outside my mother’s building.”
It’s not a question. I’ve seen his car - the black sedan that doesn’t belong in this neighborhood, the shadow behind the windshield that watches until my light goes off.
His jaw works. “Sometimes.”
“How many times?”
“Christine-”
“How many?”
He stares at the floor. The confession comes out quiet. Ashamed. “Every night. Since the day you brought her home. I park across the street and I watch until the light in the front room goes off, and then I drive back.”
“That’s insane.” I fold my arms, ignoring the way my pulse betrays me. “That is completely insane.”
“I know.”
“You should have knocked.”
“You told me not to.”
“Since when do you do what I ask?”
He looks up at that. Meets my eyes for the first time since he sat down. “Since it’s the only thing you’ve asked me for in seven weeks.”
“I’m going to stop,” he says. “The parking. It isn’t for you, it’s for me, and I’ve been telling myself otherwise for seven weeks.” He turns the cup in his hands. “If I need to know you’re all right, I’ll ask. Out loud. Like a person.”
“And if I don’t answer?”
“Then I don’t get to know.” He says it steadily, like he’s already made his peace with it. “That’s what space means. I’m learning.”
The words land somewhere in my chest. I don’t know what to do with them.