“That kid,” Aidan said, straightening from the wall, bristling with aggression. “I’ll fucking kill him. It was him, wasn’t it? That fucking football-playing prick–”
“You morons!” Maggie hissed. “No, it wasn’t him.”
“Mags.” Mercy had appeared, halfway down the hall, hands in his pockets, face absolutely wrecked, looking gigantic and ten-years-old all at once. Maggie turned to him as the tears filled her eyes. “What’d they say?”
“Concussion,” Maggie said, swallowing. “Bumps, bruises…and a miscarriage.”
His dark eyes widened; grief played across his face, sudden and overwhelming. But he didn’t ask her any questions, the way the other two had. He knew; Maggie saw his jaw twitch and understood that he knew. Maggie wondered if Ava had told him yet, or if this was the first he’d heard of it.
He brought his hands out, smoothed his hair back, eyes gleaming. “Can I go in and see her?”
“What–” Ghost started to ask, and Maggie waved for him to hush.
“Yes,” she told Mercy. “She’s asleep, but…”
He was already moving. He didn’t spare them a glance as he entered the room, and he didn’t hesitate: grabbed a chair, dragged it over, dropped into it and leaned onto the edge of her bed, up close to her head.
Aidan was starting to get it. “No…” he said, slowly, face going slack.
Ghost said, “Who the fuck’s baby did she miscarry?”
Maggie wanted to scream. She batted furiously at her tears.
“Mercy,” Aidan said, as if in a trance. “But he wouldn’t…”
Maggie met her husband’s unforgiving glare. “Mercy’s,” she said quietly. “The baby was his.”
Ghost blinked, once, twice…and Maggie lunged at him, throwing herself in front of him, catching him by the biceps as he started to charge into Ava’s room.
“Ghost!” she pleaded in a whisper. “No, not now. Baby, just let him have a minute.Please.”
He couldn’t even speak. His jaw was locked tight, his eyes blazing.
“He can’t get her pregnant again right now,” Maggie reasoned. “A minute, Ghost. Just for tonight.” She leaned in closer, digging her fingers into his arms. “Helovesher, and even if you’re furious, you know that.”
He shook her off roughly and strode down the hall, his spine an iron bar between his shoulder blades.
Maggie slumped sideways into the wall, and found Aidan’s befuddled gaze.
He was too shocked to be angry yet. “I…I had no idea.”
“No one did.” Because people saw what they wanted to, expected to, and so rarely whatwas.
She looked like such a tiny thing, swallowed up in the white hospital gown, tucked up on the pillows, her fanning hair black under the tube lights. Her eyes had settled deeply in her head, the lids dark not with makeup, but with bruises. The ugly split on her cheek was pulled together with a butterfly bandage. Her face, such pale, fine-grained skin and delicate features, was a frail, powdered-sugar thing; the veins traced just beneath her temples; the flesh of her lips grew dry and pale as breath passed between them. The IV dripped…dripped…dripped, and she slept, her chest rising in slow, shallow lifts of the covers. The bruises, so many of them, were coming up beneath her skin, on her neck, her arms, the wedge of shoulder where her gown gapped.
Miscarriage. The word was a brand against his frontal lobe, burning through his brain.
Miscarriage meant baby. Baby meanthis.
Mercy reached over slowly – he saw the tremor in his arm, and couldn’t remember ever having seen it before in his life – and laid his hand on Ava’s flat stomach.
That’s what she’d come to talk to him about that morning. That pained, tearful expression on her face in his living room had been about the baby.
He felt her pulse, through her stomach, the gown and the scratchy sheets, pushing against his palm, accusing him. Seventeen, and she’d already had a baby and lost it. Seventeen, and for a moment, they’d been co-creators of a life that was nothing but the two of them together, all their own, something no one else could touch.
And now it was gone.
Ava felt a hand on her and knew it belonged to Mercy. She knew the weight and shape of his hands, their calluses and cracks and the thick cuticles from the hours he spent in the bike shop. She knew the pattern of his breathing. The aura he brought into a room, the way the air felt when he stirred it.
