And the ache in my belly slowly turns into dread.
Something isn’t right. Kendra obviously kept secrets from me, and for good reason. But when we had met with Kendra, she had seemed open about hiring a wet nurse. It hadn’t seemed to cross her mind to use Malia.
Of course, that all could have been a show for keeping me in the dark as much as possible.
But what was the point?
What was the point of keeping me in the dark about Malia being the wet nurse, if she was going to reveal it to me immediately, anyway?
The sound of my baby nursing against another woman’s breast claws at my insides, a pressure building up within my chest for which I have no release.
Something is wrong.
I push myself off the boulder and stumble forward. I don’t know what I plan to do. Snatch him out of her arms, I suppose. But as I limp toward them, yet another contraction ripples through me. This one is not nearly as painful as the others, and a cruel hope sneaks into my mind.
“Is there another child?” I ask, my voice desperate. For a single foolish moment, I picture a baby I’ll be allowed to keep, allowed to raise.
“No,” says Malia, dashing my hope. “And you need to stay there. At least until you’ve passed the afterbirth.”
The afterbirth. I’ve forgotten about that. It’s a word I’ve heard, but I’ve never actually considered what it meant.
“There’s always a risk of hemorrhaging,” says Malia, voice still calm. Concerned, even. “If we’re gone before you pass it, there’s a potion in my satchel. I’ll leave it here. It should help the blood clot. Keep you from bleeding out.”
My mind should hang up on the wordsbleeding out, but instead, it gets caught onif we’re gone.
“You’re going to take him to Nolan, then,” I say. “You’re not bringing my husband here.”
Malia shakes her head, her long silver hair swaying behind her.
“Please, could you just let me see him?” I say.
There’s another sound and then a whimper as Malia removes my child from her breast. She slips her tunic back over her shoulder, recovering herself.
When she turns to face me, there are tears streaming down her face.
Again, I’m struck with the notion that something is terribly wrong. But before I can ask, another contraction rips through me.
“I can’t tell you how sorry I am,” she says. And there’s genuine sympathy in her eyes. There’s something else there, too, a guilt I can’t quite grasp.
This isn’t her doing. In fact, it’s exactly what Nolan and I are paying her to do.
Perhaps if I had not been through what I’ve been through in this life, I would mistake that guilt for a deep sense of empathy, for someone who takes others’ burdens upon their own hearts and blames themselves for pain they did not cause.
But I am not so naïve a girl anymore.
“You’re not taking my baby to Nolan, are you?” I ask.
Malia purses her lips as if to hold back a sob. My sluggish mind works to put the pieces together.Why?Why would Kendra betray us like this? It doesn’t seem the type of thing that would be good for her business.
Unless… unless someone paid her more.
“The Sister,” I say. “She gave Kendra another offer, didn’t she? To take my baby to her instead of Nolan?”
Malia pauses. “That would be the easier story,” she says. “But Kendra rescued me from a dire situation. I won’t put the blame on her, especially when I know what your husband is capable of. Kendra knows nothing. When I told her you could only have been with child for three or four months, she believed me.”
“Then why do this?” I say.
“The Sister has my child,” she explains. “She took him from me. This was before I met Kendra. The Sister lets me see him, but only enough to feed him. Once he grows and becomes more dependent on solid food and less on me, I’ll see less and less of him. My time is running out with my son. So when the Sister told me to take up employment with Kendra and bide my time, I did.
