Rachel was in pain and all I wanted to do was reach out and hold her, but I couldn't move. I was frozen in place, horror turning my blood into ice water as I listened to her slowly, haltingly, tell her story.

"I used to faint with every period." She twisted the sheet in her hands as she stared fixedly at a point on the wall. "Every month it got worse. They told me - they told me it was the curse of womanhood and I needed to pray harder, to lift my burden up. But the bleeding only got heavier, and then I started to bleed even when it wasn't my period." She looked down at her hands, her cheeks red with anger and shame. "I used to stuff old undergarments under my skirts to catch the blood before going out into the fields to work, but they'd be soaked by midmorning."

An involuntary growl escaped my throat. She glanced at me and then pressed her lips together. "Since God wasn't answering my prayers, it was clear to the rest of the community that I was an unredeemable sinner. I started losing my friends. My parents lost their friends. We were isolated, but my mother," her voice caught. "My mother was brave. She defied the Elders and snuck me out of the community. I'd never been to a hospital before. From the way the Chosen kids all gossiped, I was sure it had to be either the gateway to hell or some kind of mystical fairyland. I almost wish I'd been conscious enough to see it."

She fell silent. I unfroze enough to be able to reach out and take her long braid into my hands. I twisted the curl at the end around my finger twice before trailing it up to rub her scalp. She hummed quietly and closed her eyes, ducking to let me knead the tension away around her temples and smooth the wrinkles in her brow. I focused solely on that, letting my sight go all tunnel vision because I was afraid that if I turned my head, I would see the two perfect children - the boy with my brother's face and the girl with hers - running far off and out of my reach. 

"Come here," I grated out. I pulled her to me and wrapped her in my arms. The sob she'd been holding back broke loose and she started to cry against my chest. Great, heaving sobs, the sound of the pain she'd been through. My stomach twisted. She was in so much pain. I loved her so much and there was nothing I could do to help it and that was like a knife to the gut.

"I - I lived." She laughed ruefully and pulled back from me, wiping her eyes. "I mean, obviously. But the fibroids were throughout my uterus." She didn't even color at the frank word. "The only way to stop the hemorrhaging was to take the whole thing."

"How old were you?" My voice was little more than a croak. 

"Twenty. I went back to the Chosen afterward. I mean, of course I did, it was all that I had ever known but...” Her voice caught again, and I pulled her to me until she could catch her breath enough to continue. "Word got out. And, and the men I'd grown up with, the ones I expected to be matched with and marry, they - they didn't want me. What good is a wife who can't bear children?" Anger crept into her voice. "Who would want such damaged goods?"

"No."

"They didn't say it to my face," she spat. "But they didn't need to. I knew when the Elders came to me and told me I had a new calling in life. 'Go out and make my way in the wide world and bring the message to the secular.’" She snorted. "Right. That's not how it works. No one has ever been given that kind of task. I wasn't being sent forth," her voice rose into hysteria. "I was being discarded!"

"Rachel!" I cupped her face between my hands as her eyes darted wildly. "Rachel, look at me." Her chest hitched, but her eyes found mine somehow. "I'm right here, okay? You got through it and you're doing so—" My voice broke. "So well." Emotion welled up in my chest, robbing me of the rest of my words, so I tried to pour everything I was feeling into a kiss. 

She gasped, and then sighed, then sagged against me. I gently lowered her back down to the bed and touched her face, her tears were still flowing freely, but she was no longer sobbing. "I never cried about it," she whispered, sounding surprised. "This whole time, I never cried. I never... mourned what I lost. My family, they told me to be grateful that I had my life."

I licked my lips. The little boy and girl who'd been running around in my brain, the ones that laughed and ran for me and called me Daddy, they had disappeared over a horizon and for a second, I mourned too. Then I pushed them to the side. "I'm grateful you're in my life," I told her, lying down and fitting myself around her. I leaned up and whispered into her ear. "I need you to know that."

She made a small sound and then nodded. I wrapped my arms around her and held her until her tears subsided. I wound her braid into my hand and held it tightly, as much for me as for her. And when her breathing relaxed into the slow, careful sips of breath she took when she'd fallen asleep, I closed my eyes against my own tears, catching them before they could fall.