13. Christine #2
I catch him looking. Not at my face - at my hands wrapped around the paper cup, at the pulse visible in my throat, at the empty crook of my arm where Isabella is supposed to be.
“Stop looking at me like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like you’re trying to keep me.”
“I am.” He doesn’t apologize for it. Doesn’t look away. “I let myself be unreachable for an entire day once, while you needed me. I’m not doing that again.”
The silence stretches. I should say something cutting. Should push him away, rebuild the wall, protect myself from the dangerous softness creeping through my defenses.
I don’t.
Maybe I’m tired of walls.
***
The doctor comes at 5:40 a.m.
I know because I’ve been watching the clock again, counting the hours in increments of terror. She’s young - younger than I expected, with kind eyes and a calm voice that immediately makes me want to trust her.
“Mrs. Morgan?”
I stand so fast I nearly spill the drink I forgot I was holding. “Is she-”
“She’s stable.” The doctor smiles, and I feel something in my chest loosen.
“Bronchiolitis, almost certainly RSV. We’re keeping her on oxygen overnight, running some fluids, suctioning her airways to help her breathe easier.
She’ll need to stay for observation - probably forty-eight hours, just to be safe. ”
“But she’s okay?”
“She’s small,” the doctor says, “but she’s strong. She’s going to be fine.”
She’s going to be fine.
The words echo through me. Simple. Impossible. The most beautiful words in the English language.
My knees go.
I don’t feel them give way - one second I’m standing, the next I’m falling, and then arms are catching me.
Not gracefully - Benedict half-lunges out of his chair and gets an arm around my ribs, and for four seconds I am holding onto my husband in a hospital corridor while a nurse pretends not to watch from the station.
Four seconds.
His hand splayed wide across my back. His mouth somewhere near my hair. His body solid and warm against mine, an anchor in a storm I didn’t realize I was drowning in.
He doesn’t say a single word.
That’s the only reason I don’t pull away sooner.
Then I pull away.
“Don’t.”
“I wasn’t going to-”
“I know.” I wipe my face with the heel of my hand, furious at the tears I can’t seem to stop. “That’s the problem. You keep not doing things, and I keep noticing that you didn’t.”
He’s quiet for a moment. Processing. That huge brain of his working through the implications of what I just said.
“Is that… bad?”
“I don’t know.” The honest answer. The only answer I have. “I don’t know what anything means anymore.”
They let me sit with Isabella at six.
The unit is quiet at this hour - soft beeps and softer footsteps, the hushed reverence of a place where miracles happen daily. My daughter is in a bassinet that looks too big for her, a cannula taped to that impossible little face, her chest rising and falling the way a chest is supposed to.
I’ve never been so grateful for anything in my life.
I take her hand - her whole fist curled around my finger - and I breathe for the first time in hours.
Benedict stands in the doorway.
Just stands there, not crossing the threshold, not assuming he’s welcome. He’s waiting for permission, I realize. This man who used to own every room he entered is waiting to be invited into his daughter’s hospital room.
“Come here,” I say.
He comes.
His footsteps are quiet on the linoleum. He stops beside me, looking down at Isabella, and I watch his face transform. The fear and guilt and desperation melt away, replaced by something softer. Something holy.
“She’s so small,” he whispers.
“She’s strong.”
“She looks like you.” His eyes don’t leave her.
“She has your chin.”
A ghost of a smile. “Poor kid. Cursed already.”
We stand there in silence, watching our daughter breathe - each rise and fall of that tiny chest a miracle neither of us deserved. And for the first time in weeks, the distance between us doesn’t feel like a chasm. It feels like something that could be crossed.
His pinky brushes mine.
This time I don’t pull away.
***
I fall asleep in the chair sometime after seven.
I don’t mean to - I’m watching Isabella, counting her breaths, running my thumb over her tiny knuckles. But the adrenaline crash catches up with me, the exhaustion of terror and relief combining into something I can’t fight.
When I wake, late-morning light is lying flat across the floor in long yellow stripes.
It takes me a moment to orient myself. Hospital. Isabella. Benedict-
Benedict is awake.
He’s in the chair beside me, still in that ridiculous wool coat and pajama pants, and Isabella is against his chest. One of his enormous hands covers the whole of her back. His eyes are red-rimmed and open, fixed on her monitor like he’s decided that looking away is the thing that would stop it.
She looks peaceful.
He looks like he hasn’t blinked in hours.
A nurse leans in to adjust the monitor, sees me watching, and whispers: “Your husband hasn’t put her down since seven. She was fussing and he asked if he could hold her. He hasn’t taken his eyes off that screen since.”
Your husband.
I open my mouth to correct her - ex-husband, soon-to-be-ex-husband, the man who abandoned me-
I don’t.
I just watch them. My daughter on her father’s chest. His hand covering her back. Two people I love more than anything, folded together in a plastic hospital chair while the morning goes on without us.
My phone lights up on the tray table.
A news alert. 11:22 a.m.
PAULINE HARTLEY brEAKS HER SILENCE. EXCLUSIVE TELL-ALL, TOMORROW.
The peace of the moment shatters.