Because it was nothing now. Nothing she could do. Nothing she could change.
Even if she wanted to.
“You’re not very comfortable with kids, are you?” he asked.
Turning her head away, she stared out at the horizon of blue, trying not to scream at the injustice of it. “I like kids.”
She’d been thrilled she was pregnant. She’d been thrilled she was going to be a mother. Nearly thirty, it had felt right in a way she couldn’t explain…not even to herself. She was ready to be a mother, ready for this next step in her life. Maybe she was too strong, too independent to make a good wife, but she knew how to love and her baby would be loved.
Then came the ultrasound.
She had a daughter.
And her daughter wasn’t healthy. Nothing had come together quite right, limbs didn’t attach correctly—a hole in her tiny heart.
Cass had been dumbstruck. The doctor talked. Cass stared at the sonogram. Her daughter—her daughter—wouldn’t survive.
Sitting there in her robe, the cold gel drying on her stomach, time came screeching to a stop. After the doctor finally finished talking, she sat silent, her head buzzing with numbing white noise. And then the cloud cleared in her head and she was herself again. Tough. Determined. The fighter.
“How can I help her?” she’d asked.
The doctor’s brow creased. He didn’t speak. His expression grew more grim. “You can’t,” he said at last.
But it wasn’t an answer she accepted. This was her daughter. Her daughter…and Maximos’s. “There must be something.” She strengthened her voice, and her resolve. “Procedures done in utero.”
“It’s unlikely she’ll even survive birth. If she does, she won’t survive outside of the womb.”
Cass shook her head, furious. She wouldn’t accept a diagnosis like that, and she’d stood then. Brave, fierce, undaunted. “You’re wrong.” Her voice didn’t waver. “She’ll make it. I’ll make sure she survives.”
But Cass had been the one wrong. Two weeks later she woke up in agony. Rushed to the hospital, she miscarried that night.
“Do you want a family?” Maximos asked, ignorant that each of his questions were absolute torture.
“Yes.” Her eyes burned but she wasn’t going to cry, couldn’t cry about the devastating loss. Some pain went too deep, some pain caused insurmountable grief.
Losing Maximos had hurt—badly, badly—but losing their child had broken her heart.
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