Total pages in book: 92
Estimated words: 86238 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 431(@200wpm)___ 345(@250wpm)___ 287(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 86238 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 431(@200wpm)___ 345(@250wpm)___ 287(@300wpm)
That has him stumped. “I… it… fuck, Ana. I don’t know. I just think there’s more to it.” I already feel like shit, but he adds more mud to my rumpled exterior. “You also never gave him the chance to explain. You yelled, said a lot of not very nice shit, then left.” He locks his hands together before wetting his lips. “And he let you because he was in shock.” When he looks at me, I see the remorse in his eyes, but it doesn’t lessen the impact of his words. “He had to take the doctor’s word that you weren’t pregnant anymore. He didn’t get to spend any time with her like you and your dad did.”
“He took her,” I confess, still shocked by Alek’s earlier confession. “He wanted to bury her.”
I had wanted the same, but because of her gestation, supposedly there was no need. She wasn’t a baby. She was a fetus. I tried to argue but I was only strong when needed, and in that case, I didn’t have it in me.
Alek wasn’t the only one shocked that day. The last thing I expected when I woke in a pool of blood at the bottom of the laundry stairs was to go through labor alone. I begged Yev when he found me to find Alek. He didn’t want to leave me, but I made him.
Alek never came.
Yev returned with a doctor who was no longer practicing due to a malpractice suit and my father. They only convinced me to go to the hospital when the doctor cautioned that I could lose more than my child—I could lose my life as well.
Alek had lost a lot at an incredibly young age, so I didn’t want him to lose me as well.
I had only just given birth to my precious, unbreathing little girl when Stace arrived at the hospital. I was clueless as to why she was in my room until she turned to Yev and said, “You didn’t tell her?”
I shouldn’t have nibbled at the bait she was dangling, being in no mental state for a fight. My child had only just been born unbreathing. I was only able to hold her for a couple of minutes, then I was wheeled into a ward where screaming, yet alive babies couldn’t be missed.
I was emotionally and physically drained but too curious for my own good.
“Alek wasn’t here because he was with me.” It was a lie Stace had said numerous times in the past three years, so I almost laughed until I spotted Yev’s downcast head.
I begged him to discredit her claim, to tell me there was no way in hell Alek had left my bed with sticky, gooey sheets to go mess Stace’s, but he didn’t say a word. He merely shrugged before suggesting I wait for Alek to show up to work out what happened.
“What did you see?” I screamed at him, startling the mother in the bed next to mine. I wasn’t with Alek, so there was no fancy private suite like there had been when we found out we were pregnant, then again three months later when we found out she was a girl. I was in a shitty hospital for runaways and abused mothers and on the verge of a breakdown. I wasn’t letting Yev off the hook. “What did you see?”
He cussed under his breath before confessing, “His car was in her driveway.”
“Did you go in?” When he acted as if I didn’t speak, I pegged the prepacked sandwich the midwife left on the table for me at his head before asking again, “Did you go in!” When he nodded, my heart rate slipped into dangerous territory. “And?”
He hated ratting out one of his ‘brothers,’ but Yev was as loyal to me as he was Alek and Ghost. “He was in her bed, passed out.”
Still to this day, I’m not sure how much time passed between Yev’s confession and Alek arriving at the hospital, but my devastation hadn’t dipped in the slightest. I went rank on him. I called him horrible names, blamed him for everything, then told him I never wanted to see him again.
I meant every single word except the final ones I said to him when he tried to stop me from boarding a train to Helsinki. He wouldn’t have let me go unless he believed I hated him, so I gave him the performance of my life.
I ripped his heart out of his chest as my fall had torn our daughter from my womb.
I gutted him, and I hate myself for that as much as I hated how cowardly I was when I let them remove my daughter from my arms before I was ready. I hadn’t named her or dressed her. I hadn’t counted her fingers or toes. I hadn’t done any of the things Alek and I discussed the night he noticed the pop in my belly. I just let them take her as if she meant nothing to me.