rel="nofollow" href="#litres_trial_promo">Chapter Thirty-Three Chapter Thirty-Four Chapter Thirty-Five Chapter Thirty-Six Chapter Thirty-Seven Epilogue About the Author By The Same Author About the Publisher
Her name was Harmony Blue. Harmony Blue Kucharski, not Forrester, as it ought to have been by then. Unmarried, nineteen, she lay in her narrow bed in the smallest of the rundown rental’s bedrooms. Her groans had already driven one of her housemates away, leaving only two people to tend her: the midwife, whose name at the time was Meredith Jones, and a teenage girl who wanted to be known as Bat.
“I’m looking out for you,” Bat said, sitting on the bed’s edge and holding her friend’s clammy hand.
Like all of the fledgling adults who came and went here, Bat was hardly capable of looking out for herself. But if her words had little impact—the young woman hardly cared what she said—the fact of Bat being there was real comfort in between the pains.
Harmony Blue, sweaty and exhausted, had once been described as “fetching.” She tried to remember where she’d heard it, who had used such a word … Then she had it: an old farmer in Wisconsin, five or six years earlier; she had been trying for the Miss Junior Dairy Maiden crown, despite never having been within milking distance of a cow. Entering the pageant had been her mother’s idea, a chance for the two-hundred-fifty-dollar prize. Pink and white hair ribbons, the young woman remembered; ruffles at her throat and knees; a rhinestone tiara that was lost in the next move.
She looked at Bat’s reflection in the mirrored closet door, at bony shoulder blades visible inside a black Duran Duran tour t-shirt, black hair cut asymmetrically, longer on the left and striped with one fuchsia swath behind her ear. Bat had style, identity, whereas she had neither. What she had was matted hair, a stretched-to-its-limits red sweatshirt, a swollen belly and a rounded, pallid face.
Excepting the belly and the fullness of her face, she appeared to be the same untethered person who’d taken refuge here ten months earlier—which just went to show how untrustworthy an image could be; nothing but the visible bit of an iceberg that was otherwise out of sight. She wasn’t the innocent she’d been when she got here. She was no longer quite so naïve.
She watched the mirror, saw her eyes narrow and her lips flatten as another contraction began and tightened, a cinched string yanking her entire body inward to its core. Then she was seeing nothing but the black heat of pain as Bat said, “Breathe, remember? Breathe!”
Slowly, her vision cleared, and the midwife examined her again. “Just about time to push,” Meredith said. Meredith’s face was thin but kind, and not so much older looking than her two companions’, whose desperate faith in her was all too common.
Harmony Blue panted, avoiding the midwife’s eyes and words and looking, instead, at the pink ceramic lamp on the dresser. A painted-on ballerina smiled serenely from the lamp’s rounded base. The light shining through the dusty lampshade warmed the room the same way it had warmed the bedroom where the lamp used to be. Where her sister had been too, until adulthood—such as it was—had come for each of them.
She concentrated on the faded Journey band poster on the wall above the lamp, positioned just as it had been in that other bedroom. “Don’t Stop Believin’” they urged in one of their songs, but she’d failed them, and now look at her. Pregnant not by a man she loved, not by the man she loved, but by a guy she barely knew, a guy she could not have cared less about. Pregnant and then paralyzed by the mistake, tortured, unable to decide what she wanted to do. Keep it? End it? Indecisive weeks had turned to months, leaving her with a different pair of choices—and even then she’d had trouble choosing, until Meredith helped her see which way to go.
Meredith had supported her wish to give birth at home, where she would not be judged. Meredith was a facilitator— that was the term she’d used, a facilitator for the people on the other end. There was some money involved, not that it mattered. There was always money in these situations, according to Bat, who’d found Meredith through the friend of a friend. The new parents’ offer to the girl, through some law firm, through Meredith, had been ten thousand dollars. For expenses, Meredith said. It would be a closed adoption. Anonymous. No strings. No names.
Bat squeezed her hand harder. “Why is there so much blood?”
Meredith, sitting on a stool at the end of the bed, leaned back and sighed. With her forearm, she brushed dark bangs back from her narrow face. “It’s normal. Okay now, with the next contraction, take a breath, focus, and push.”
Focus. Icy rain blew against the window just above the midwife’s head, pattering, streaking. Focus. How was she supposed to focus when her belly was going to split wide open at any second? This accidental baby … the pain was her punishment, pain like a hot iron shoved into her lower back, proving that there was no escaping stupidity. So she’d gotten her heart broken by the man she’d believed was perfect for her, so what? Other girls didn’t deal with heartbreak by running away, by joining a group of directionless misfits like the ones she was living with. Getting high. Getting pregnant.
Getting over it was what she should have done.
She was over it now, though. In her time here, she had not spoken of her past, not to Bat, not to Will—who’d gotten her pregnant, she didn’t care how much he’d denied it before he split—not to any of the people she’d met. If she revealed her heartbreak, they would see her for the fool she was. They’d reject her too, she was sure. She had not spoken of her past, and she would not.
“Deep breath,” Meredith said. “You’re almost there.”
“No,” she moaned, holding her belly. “No, I can’t.” If time would only stop for a minute, let her catch her breath, let her spend a little longer with the baby there beneath her hands. It was true that she hadn’t been sure, at first, if she’d continue the pregnancy. It was true that this baby owed its existence more to inaction than intent. Even so, they were good friends now. She’d tried to protect him—or was it her?—she’d really tried. A few more days as one entity. Maybe that would be enough.
“Push now.” The midwife’s face was lighted, eager. “Come on, here’s the head.”
She began to cry, knowing there was no stopping it, pain like a locomotive pulling, pulling the baby on to its real life, its better life. She wanted that for this child, this unintended effect
