Chapter 10
The pressure suddenly released. I fell back against the wall, gasping for air, staring blindly into the dark.
Silence.
A heavy, terrifying, suffocating silence.
“Julian?” I whispered, my heart stopping entirely. “Julian, is she…”
“Come on,” Julian begged in the dark. I heard the frantic rustle of fabric. “Come on, little one. Breathe. Breathe for your mother. Breathe for me.”
Please, I prayed to a God I hadn’t spoken to in years. Take my life. Take my career. Take everything. Just let her breathe.
And then, a sound pierced the darkness.
It was thin, raspy, and furious. A tiny, indignant wail of life.
I broke into massive, shuddering sobs. “Give her to me. Julian, give her to me.”
He moved up beside me, placing a tiny, warm, slippery weight onto my bare chest. I wrapped my arms around her, feeling the frantic, rapid flutter of her tiny heart against mine. She was impossibly small, a fragile bird, but she was crying. She was alive.
Julian wrapped his arms around both of us, burying his face in my neck, weeping uncontrollably.
Suddenly, a loud mechanical clank echoed through the shaft. The fluorescent lights overhead flickered violently and surged back to life, blinding us. The elevator jerked and began to slowly descend to the floor below.
The doors slid open.
A team of maintenance workers and a panicked Dr. Maya stood in the hallway, their jaws dropping at the sight of us: me, exhausted and covered in blood, holding a tiny, screaming infant, and Julian, shirtless, crying, holding us both like a human shield against the world.
“Get a gurney!” Maya screamed down the hall.
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The next three weeks were a blur of NICU monitors, sterile scrubs, and the agonizing wait for Hope—the name we gave her, because she survived in the absolute dark—to grow strong enough to breathe on her own.
Julian never left the hospital. He slept in a rigid plastic chair by the incubator. He talked to Hope through the glass, promising her the moon and the stars and a lifetime of safety. I watched him, day after day, and the final, stubborn walls around my heart quietly crumbled into dust.
