Chapter 3 Clear it!

Something shifted in his face.

It looked almost like irritation, and yet, I couldn’t place my finger on a particular emotion.

"She's a girl," he shook his head.

Just those three words, said the way you state the weather, said the way you read a figure from a spreadsheet, said without heat or shame or any acknowledgement of the human being currently pressed against my chest listening to every word.

"I needed a son. You couldn't give me that."

The floor moved.

Or I moved. I could not tell.

My free hand found the side of my worn jeans without thinking, pressing flat against the faded denim, rubbing once the way I did when I needed to steady myself, the fabric thin at the thigh from years of exactly this, from years of standing in rooms where I needed my hands to have somewhere to go.

"I --- " I started, my eyes widened to show a hint of the large amount of pain dwelling in them .

There were three of them before Lily.

Three times I had lain on a table in a clinic that smelled like antiseptic and fluorescent light while a doctor did what Callum had decided needed doing, because the scans had come back and the results were always the same and Callum had a name to carry forward and a legacy to protect and I had told myself each time that I understood, that I supported him, that this was what marriage looked like when you loved someone who had a plan bigger than both of you.

Three girls.

Three times I had driven home alone and sat in the bathroom with my back against the cold tub and told myself I was fine.

And then Lily came.

He had held her in the delivery room. I remembered it with the specific clarity of a moment I had replayed a thousand times, the way he took her from the nurse and looked down at her face, and I had thought, from the bed where I was still shaking and exhausted and completely wrung out, I had thought, there it is. There is the thing I have been waiting for. There is the man I married underneath all the rest of it.

I had believed that.

I had believed it completely.

I looked at Callum Weston directly in the eye, "She's not ----" My voice cracked. barely above a breath, thin and unsteady.

.

"She's not the first. You know she's not the first. There were three before her and you were there for all three and you told me each time that it was the right —"

My throat closed around the rest of it.

Three girls I never got to name.

I wiped my hand down the side of my jeans again. The fabric was soft from washing, worn almost through at the seam, and I pressed my palm flat against it and I looked at him and for one moment, for one single unplanned moment, I forgot to look away.

--- Pah!

His hand moved before I registered that it was going to move.

The sound of a hand meeting flesh tore through the quiet cabin and Lily screams. I stagger shocked with my cheek burning and the world ringing at the edges and Lily's arms locked around my neck so tight I can feel her shaking.

My cheek was burning.

Lily was still shaking against my shoulder.

My mind went blank for a minute and I blinked furiously to clear up my blurry vision.

I just got slapped! By my fucking husband.

I turned around and walked out.

Lily was crying, properly crying, and I bounced her automatically, the small rhythmic motion I had done ten thousand times, my body doing the work my mind could not.

I was trying to adjust her weight.

She was slipping, shifting, small and heavy and distressed, and I reached back with my free hand to get a better hold and I was not looking at the path and I was not looking at my feet and I did not see the trunk until it was already too late.

The ground came up hard.

The back of my head connected with the edge of the trunk and the world went white, then silent, then very far away.

I was on the path with my cheek against cold ground and the sky above me moving slowly in and out of focus and Lily's voice coming from somewhere that sounded like it was underwater.

From somewhere above me, from the direction of the porch, I heard a door open.

Did he come to apologise?

Callum's voice sounding faintly inconvenienced.

"Yeah, it's me. There's a situation at the property." A pause. "Nothing serious. Just come and clear it before the neighbours notice."

Clear it.

Not, she fell, not, call the ambulance.

Not my name.

Not, is she breathing?.

Clear it.

Like I was something spilled.

Like I was something tracked in on the bottom of a shoe.

Lily was crying.

I tried to get up.

My body did not answer.

I moved my hand toward the sound of her crying.

My fingers found cold earth.

I thought about my mother.

About her voice on a Sunday morning, about the thirty-two times her name lit up my phon

e and I watched it ring and I chose his comfort and I let it go to voicemail.

I never called her back.