Blood. So much blood.

“Rob, you’re hurt.” I said it over and over in the ambulance. He was covered in it. I wanted to get up and help him—he was sobbing, in so much pain, I couldn’t stand it—but they wouldn’t let me, kept covering my face with a mask. Strapped me down. I couldn’t move.

I called his name. Felt his hand in mine.

Then darkness.

I woke, seasick. Throwing up nothing.

“Rob.” My voice was hoarse. My throat hurt. “Are you okay?”

I felt his hand in mine. His face swam in front of my eyes. I couldn’t focus.

“I’m fine, baby.” His voice was hoarse too. I felt his lips on the back of my hand, the inside of my wrist. “You’re the one I’m worried about.”

“I’m okay,” I whispered. I tried to remember. It was all backwards. I remembered Rob kissing me awake. A sweet surprise. A puppy? Was I dreaming? And then darkness.

“Catherine.” I spoke her name, the memory of her eyes, so dark and cold, that slow spreading grin. The boom in my ears, the smell of searing flesh. I remembered being shot.

“You’re out of surgery now.” Rob, right next to my ear, stroking my hair. “Just rest.”

“The baby?” I whispered, my hand moving to my belly, terrified I would find it empty, but no. There was my little bump. I caressed it, relieved.

“She’s fine. Can’t you hear her heart beating?”

Like horses. I smiled, closing my eyes, and floated.

I woke up in pain. A few minutes, a million years, days later. I don’t know.

“They’re giving you something for the pain.” Rob held my hand. “They can’t stop it. Sweetheart, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

Another pain seared through my belly, a deep, cramping sensation, an unstoppable force, like something was in me and it wanted out.

“Did she kill the baby?” I whispered, blinking up at him. My throat was still on fire. I couldn’t talk.

Rob pressed my hand to his cheek, bent his head, and sobbed.

It was happening. I willed my body to stop, stop, stop! But nothing I did mattered. It was a force of nature, my body doing it all on its own. My baby was coming. She was coming, but it was too early.

“Make them do something!” I begged, clutching Rob’s hand, but they just stood there, shaking their heads, watching it happen.

The doctor was a woman. She had small, cold hands, curly blonde hair and big, dark eyes. They were wide as she talked to me. She said she was Dr. McNeil, but I could call her Casey. I called her Dr. Casey.

“You’re in active labor. You’ve got a bulging amniotic sac.” Dr. Casey said. “I’m sorry, but there’s nothing we can do to stop it.”

They kept saying that. It was a relentless refrain, like the contractions, one after the other.

“You’re only twenty weeks along,” Dr. Casey explained between contractions. She offered me a sip of water. I needed to stay hydrated, I thought, or else I could go into labor.

Except I was already in labor.

“The baby... she’s very small. And her lungs, they won’t be developed yet.”

“But she’ll have a chance?” Rob asked, sounding so hopeful. Somehow, I already knew.

“I’m sorry, but there’s nothing we can do at this point. She won’t be able to breathe on her own.”

“Can’t you help her breathe?” Rob again. I couldn’t ask questions. I was in too much pain. The drugs made my head fuzzy, but the pain was still there.

Dr. Casey explained, something about surfactant, a substance that allows the lungs to inflate, not being present in a baby’s lungs until later in gestation. She said, maybe, if it had happened in a few more weeks, they could have done something. None of it mattered because I was going to lose her. I was losing her right now. My body was rejecting her, pushing her out. I couldn’t keep her.

I sobbed into my pillow and screamed during the contractions. My already hoarse voice disappeared so I screamed silently, alone in an ocean of pain and blood and loss.

“She’s coming!” I croaked, panicked, grabbing hold of Rob’s shirt and burying my face there. “I can’t stop it!”

“It’s okay,” he said, his face wet against mine. “Let her come.”

But if she came, she’d die. And if she died, I would die. I couldn’t let it happen.

She came anyway.

There was more pain, more blood, more fire. I screamed and pushed and then she was here, in this world, far too harsh for her translucent skin and tiny limbs. She didn’t cry, but she tried valiantly to take a breath. She couldn’t.

Dr. Casey cut and clamped the umbilical cord, the only thing left keeping her attached, and handed her to me. She was so tiny I could hold her in my hands. Rob looked over my shoulder at her, tears falling onto her little belly. I could count each of her ribs and could see hear heart beating—a dark, red throb—through her chest wall.

“She’s beautiful.” Rob kissed the top of my head. “She looks like you.”

She did. She had my chin and my mouth and my nose. I wished I could see her open her eyes, but they were still fused shut. She was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. She moved in my hands, opened her mouth, stretched her arms and legs, but she didn’t breathe. Just like Dr. Casey had said, there was nothing they could do.

“Hold her.” I held my hands out to Rob. I wanted him to feel her move, to hold her while she was still here, still alive.

He could hold her in one hand. I put her in his palm, sobbing as I watched him kiss her tiny bald head, touch her hand gently with a fingertip. She wrapped her little hand around his finger. It didn’t span it, not even close, but she was holding on.

“Talk to her,” Dr. Casey encouraged. “She knows your voices. Tell her goodbye.”

We bent our heads together and whispered her name.

“Goodbye, Esther.” Rob’s voice shook. “We love you.”

“You’ll always be my baby,” I whispered, my tears falling onto her naked little body. I looked up at Rob, my voice nearly completely gone. “She never knew anything but love.”

Dr. Casey cleaned me up and the nurse wrote some things down and checked my blood pressure and my I.V. and put Esther in a blanket, but then they left us alone to be with her for a while. I thought the pain of losing her would tear me apart. Then I saw Rob holding her, sobbing, and knew an even greater sorrow than I’d ever experienced. I didn’t think I could survive it.

“I’m so sorry,” I sobbed when he put her on the blanket in my lap. She was gone now, her heart still in her chest. “It’s all my fault.”

“No,” he murmured, putting an arm around me. “We can’t do that. We can’t blame ourselves or each other. It will kill us.”

Us. Him and me. How could there be an “us” after this?

“Sabrina, I love you.” His face was tear-stained, eyes red from crying. “We just lost our baby and I came that close to losing you too. I can’t... I just can’t... I couldn’t live without you.”

We put our arms around each other and rocked together, as if it might offer some comfort. The nurse came in and weighed and measured her. When she asked if we had a name for the baby, Rob met my eyes and we both said, “Esther.” They asked if we wanted her to be buried or cremated. I thought of that name, Esther Burns, engraved on a tombstone somewhere, and it just broke me.

They gave us a card with her footprints inked onto it and several photographs taken with a digital camera and printed at the nurses’ station. They said we would get a birth certificate in the mail in a few weeks. Born and died on the very same day.

“You can bring in the rest of your family,” Dr. Casey urged when she came in to check on me. She had seen them all gathered in the hallway, pacing, worrying. “Let them say goodbye too. It helps. Closure.”

I looked at Rob, helpless. He went to get them all. Tyler, Katie, Sarah, even Daisy and Jesse. They all took turns holding her, exclaiming over how tiny, how perfect, how beautiful, and she was. She was my heart they were holding in their hands, passing around the room.

“I’m so sorry.” Katie hugged me tight, tight, and just when I thought I didn’t have any more tears left in me, I sobbed against her shoulder.

They all hugged me goodbye with tears in their eyes.

And then it was just me and Rob. And Esther, wrapped in a receiving blanket meant for a newborn. She was lost in it.

“Where’s Catherine?” I asked. The details, whatever they were, would matter later. For now, that’s all I wanted to know.

“In jail.” Rob’s face changed at the mention of her name.

“Leave her there.” I looked up and saw he knew what I meant. I could see it in his eyes. “Don’t go after her. Don’t do anything stupid. I don’t want to lose you either.”

He nodded slowly, reaching a hand out to take mine.

“I’m tired.” I closed my eyes. The adrenaline of giving birth was wearing off. So was the pain medication. My shoulder throbbed.

“You rest.” He kissed my forehead and picked up Esther, going over to put her in the bassinette. I opened my eyes to see her, so tiny in that giant crib meant for a full-sized newborn. I tried to imagine what it would have been like if I’d carried her to term. If things had gone differently. If only...

“I’ll be right here when you wake up.” Rob pulled a chair over next to the bed, taking my hand again, like he couldn’t let go. I squeezed, holding on tight. Rob was still my everything. It had always been, and always would be. Our world could expand or contract to include as many others as the universe allowed, but at its center, the core, we were us.

So, I didn’t just hold his hand as we both drifted off, I clung to it, desperate to hang onto my center. Otherwise, I felt like I might float away too, just follow Esther into the atmosphere and disappear into the nothing.

~*~

They let me go home two days later. I left the hospital without my baby, my belly strangely flat and empty, a hole in my shoulder and another in my heart. Rob and Jesse helped me into the house—I was still weak from blood loss and woozy from the medication—and I stopped on the steps, where it had all happened, just for a moment.

Someone had cleaned up all the blood, but there was a faint outline, a ghost of what had happened there. And there was a chip in the limestone where the first bullet had hit, a permanent reminder.

Rob insisted on carrying me up the stairs. I couldn’t help remembering the first time he’d done that, our first night together in this house. I’d still been pregnant then. I had a feeling I would have moments like that a lot over the next week, even months. Realizations that, oh, I was still pregnant then. Esther was still alive and kicking inside me back then.

We were planning a memorial, but not until next week. Rob insisted I come home and settle in for a while before people descended, and I was grateful. Still, people crept by periodically, peering in like I was part of a freak show at a carnival, until I couldn’t stand it anymore.

“Just let them all in!” I told Rob, settling myself up against the pillows. I was still bleeding heavily from the birth—so much blood—and my shoulder was bandaged and painful, but at least my voice was back. “Let’s get it over with.”

I was only half-joking.

Katie and Tyler came in first. They pulled up one of the wing-backed chairs and Katie sat in Tyler’s lap, which made me smile. Clearly, they were an item again. And they both looked good. A little tired, but we all were.

“Sabrina, I just...” Katie blinked back tears, which made me tear up too. I cried constantly now, it felt like. My tears didn’t have an ‘off’ switch. “I’m so sorry. It was my fault. I didn’t know it was Catherine! If I’d just taken Tyler with me...”

“She disguised herself pretty well.” Rob said from the doorway, waving Sarah in. “She fooled security at the cameras. They didn’t recognize her either.”

“How did it happen?” I asked. I wanted to know now, and they had spent time piecing it all together while I was in surgery.

“I bought the puppy from a mutual friend of ours,” Rob said, sitting on the edge of the bed. “Vanessa breeds mastiffs and happened to have a litter. It was perfect timing.”

“Another perfect storm you mean,” Celeste said from the doorway, shaking her head as she leaned against it.

“Hi Celeste.” I hadn’t seen her since we got back from Europe.

“That woman is insane.” She crossed the room, leaning in to kiss my cheek. “And now we both have the scars to prove it. Sabrina, I can’t tell you how sorry I am for your loss.”

“Thank you.” It was such a silly phrase, under the circumstances, but there wasn’t a better one.

“From what the police have pieced together, Catherine found out through this mutual friend, Vanessa, that Rob was getting one of her puppies,” Celeste continued. “This was right after Catherine lost in court and she was pretty pissed.”

“I told you she hated to lose.” Rob’s face darkened at the memory.

“Catherine knew she couldn’t get past security here,” Tyler said. “Jesse said she tried, showing up drunk and standing at the gate, punching in random codes, the week before.”

“Yeah,” Rob agreed. “That’s when I installed the cameras and made sure we were doing visual checks at the gate.”

“Apparently, this Vanessa is a model wannabe or something?” Celeste shrugged. “Anyway, Catherine got her a meeting with someone important. I don’t know who.”

“Michael Kors,” Rob chimed in.

“Right. Of course, the meeting happened to be at the same time Rob was picking up the puppy. So, Catherine told Vanessa not to worry, she’d take care of it.”

“She took care of it all right,” Tyler muttered.

It all made horrible, perfect sense, except one thing.

“How did she know whoever came to pick up the puppy wouldn’t recognize her?” I asked. “It could have been Jesse or Tyler or someone who knew her, right?”

The room grew quiet.

Finally, Celeste spoke up. “She didn’t. From what Vanessa says, she thought Rob was coming.”

“She planned to kill me there,” Rob said softly.

“Oh my God.” The blood drained from my face at the thought. I remembered Catherine, that twisted smile and the evil look in her eyes when she pulled the trigger. Had she decided to shoot me because she couldn’t get to him? Or had she changed her mind on the ride over? Then something occurred to me. “What about the hair? The wig?”

“I called her on the way.” Katie flushed, sounding miserable as she spoke. “I called to say I was running late.”

Oh no. So of course, Catherine knew Rob wasn’t coming, and when she found that out, her whole plan had to change. And she just rolled with it, I thought. Like a steamroller, right through the middle of my life.

“She knew Katie probably wouldn’t recognize her.” Tyler gave Katie an extra, comforting squeeze. “And it gave her enough time to raid Vanessa’s wardrobe and come up with something else.”

Something else. Like killing me. Or all of us.

Then I remembered.

“Oh my God, the puppy. How is she?”

“Oh, she’s fine,” Katie smiled, sliding out of Tyler’s lap and heading toward the door. “I’ve been taking good care of her.”

“How are you feeling now?” Sarah asked. I think it was the first time she’d spoken since we all said hello.

“Better.” I smiled at her, knowing she meant well, but I couldn’t answer her honestly. No one wanted to hear about my broken heart. Besides, they all knew. “Getting better.”

“Here she is!” Katie appeared in the doorway, carrying the puppy. She was enormous, a good twenty pounds already, twice the size of a newborn, and she flopped onto the bed when Katie put her down, tripping over her big paws on her way over to say hello.

“Easy!” Rob cautioned, but I didn’t care how much my shoulder hurt when the puppy hurled herself into my arms.

I buried my face in her fur and let her lick me and smelled her sweet puppy breath.

“Such a feisty girl,” I laughed as she nipped at my hands. “You’re a fighter, huh? I’m gonna call you Pepper.”

I looked up at Rob, realizing I’d named a baby and a puppy in the same week, except we only got to keep one of them. 

“There’s just one thing... I don’t know, maybe I dreamed it. My memory is pretty fuzzy.” I pet Pepper, her tongue lolling out of her mouth as she panted in my lap. “Catherine said something... it’s all muddled... something about your brother.”

I looked at Sarah, frowning. “Do you have a brother?”

“No.” She shook her head, glancing at Rob and shrugging.

“And then she said something about...” I hesitated, looking at Rob, and then laughed. “Okay, it’s crazy, I must have dreamed it or hallucinated or something. She said something about you killing a man, Rob. When you were... twelve?”

No one said anything. The silence hung there as I looked around the room at their faces. None of them met my eyes.

“Yeah, it’s crazy.” I shook my head. “It must have been all those drugs they gave me.”

“Sounds like they were good ones,” Tyler said with a grin, making everyone laugh “Can I have some?”

“None for you!” Katie punched him on the shoulder with a laugh.

“Okay, you guys.” Rob stood, stretching. “I think it’s about time we let the patient get some rest.”

“Do you want me to take her?” Katie asked, nodding at the puppy in my lap.

“No.” I scratched her neck, smiling. “Let her stay.”

“Celeste, will you tell Daisy to bring our girl up some food?” Rob asked. He winked at me. “No more hospital food. Daisy made homemade ravioli. And chocolate cake.”

I smiled, even though I didn’t have much of an appetite.

They all filed out, one by one, giving me gentle hugs before going.

When they were gone, Rob joined me in bed, putting his head in my lap next to the puppy and let her lick his face. I stroked them both.

“Glad to be home?” he asked.

“I’m glad to be with you.”

“Are you?” He tilted his head to look up at me, eyes searching. “Cuz I’ve been nothing but trouble since you met me.”

“You are trouble.” I laughed at his little pun.  “But I’m the one who followed you.”

“I’m sorry.” He sighed, closing his eyes.

“I’m not.” I ran my hand through his hair, wondering if Esther’s would have been so dark and thick. Wondering if our next baby would have my chin, his eyes. Because I knew, no matter what, I didn’t regret it, not a moment of it.

“I’d do it again.” I whispered. My heart had been broken in innumerable pieces and yet here it was, beating in my chest, put back together in this moment by this man. “I’d follow you anywhere.”