Dante came back forty minutes later with a Chick-fil-A bag and a milkshake and I ate every single bite while Sarai slept on my chest and Rita watched a game show on the hospital TV and for an hour, just an hour, things felt almost normal.
I looked down at my daughter’s face. Her eyes were closed and her mouth was slightly open and her tiny chest rose and fell with breaths that were so small and so new that each one felt like a miracle I didn’t deserve.
I was going to be the mother I always wanted to have. I was going to be present and honest and fierce and soft and everything Vivica wasn’t. I was going to tell Sarai the truth about where she came from and who her family was and I was going to let her decide for herself what kind of woman she wanted to be. And when she was old enough, I was going to introduce her to her big sister and pray that Kayla would forgive me for the twelveyears I spent watching from across the street instead of walking over and saying her name.
Sarai shifted against my chest and sighed and I held her tighter and made the promise again. This time I meant it with everything I had.
25
Quest
There was so much blood on the deck of the yacht and it wasn’t stopping.
I noticed it about twenty minutes into the ride. Mehar was lying on her side with her head in Bryce’s lap and I was holding her hand, talking to her through the contractions, counting the seconds between them because counting was something I could do, when I looked down and saw it pooling beneath her on the white fiberglass. Dark red, almost black, spreading slow and steady like something inside her had opened that wasn’t supposed to open yet.
“Mehar.” I kept my voice even. “How do you feel?”
“Everything hurts, Quest. How do you think I feel?”
There she was. Still her, even through the pain. Good.
“I need you to tell me if anything changes. If the pain moves or gets different or something feels wrong.”
“It all feels wrong.” She squeezed my hand hard enough to grind my knuckles together. “But yeah. I’ll tell you.”
I looked at Bryce over her head. He’d seen the blood too. His face went completely still, which meant he was terrified and managing it. I gave him a look that said don’t say anything andhe gave me one back that said I wasn’t going to. We didn’t want to send her further into distress. But I was worried as fuck. This was not normal by any stretch.
I stood up and walked to the wheelhouse where Prime was standing next to Tomás.
“How much longer?”
“Forty minutes,” Tomás said. “Maybe thirty-five if the water stays calm.”
“She’s bleeding.”
Prime’s head turned. “How bad?”
“Bad enough. We need to move faster.”
Tomás pushed the throttle forward without being asked again. The engines climbed, the yacht surged. I held onto the doorframe and felt the vibration in my teeth. Thirty-five minutes. My daughter was trying to come into the world on a boat in the middle of the Caribbean. My fiancée was bleeding on the deck. The nearest hospital was thirty-five minutes of open water away.
I went back to Mehar. Sat down next to her. Took her hand again. These hands had done everything for the last few weeks. Built fires, gutted fish, cracked coconuts, killed a boar, carried this woman through a hurricane on my back. My hands were the one thing I could always rely on. They fixed things. They built things. They protected the people I loved.
Right now they were just holding hers and it wasn’t enough.
• • •
I carried her off the boat and into the emergency room at St. George’s General Hospital looking like something the ocean spit out. Sunburned. Bearded. Thirty pounds lighter than the man I used to be. My clothes were torn and salt-stained and my shoes had fallen apart two weeks ago on the island so I was barefooton hospital tile carrying a pregnant woman who was bleeding through the shirt I’d wrapped around her.
Nobody knew who I was. Nobody looked at me and saw all the professional bullshit. Not the CEO of Banks Reserve, the man who could buy this hospital and the land it sat on without checking his balance. They saw a desperate man covered in sand and sweat carrying a woman who needed help, and for the first time in my adult life my name and my money were completely useless. I was nobody. I was just a man begging.
“Somebody help us. She’s pregnant. She’s bleeding. Please.”
They moved fast after that. Nurses and orderlies swarmed with a gurney. I set her down and they were already cutting her clothes, checking vitals and somebody was asking me questions I could barely process. How far along? When did the bleeding start? Any complications during the pregnancy? Pre-existing conditions?
“She’s around thirty-two weeks. We were stranded on an island for about three weeks. No prenatal care. No vitamins. No medical attention at all. The bleeding started about an hour ago on the boat. The contractions are two to three minutes apart.”
The nurse looked at me like I’d said we’d arrived by spaceship. “Stranded? For three weeks?”
