My hand looked enormous next to her body. This hand had done so much and was now inside a plastic box, trying not to break the smallest person I’d ever seen. I touched her arm with one finger. Her skin was warm, impossibly soft. I could feel her pulse through it, rapid and light, a hummingbird heartbeat.
I slid my finger down to her hand and her fingers curled around my fingertip. Instinct, the nurse said. A reflex. But it didn’t feel like a reflex. It felt like my daughter grabbing onto me and telling me she was here and she was fighting and she needed me to fight too.
Her eyes stayed closed. Her chest rose and fell with the ventilator. The machines beeped and hummed around her. I stood there with my finger in my daughter’s fist and felt something rearrange inside me. Something permanent. Something that wasn’t going back to where it was before.
I didn’t have a name for her yet. Mehar and I had been narrowing the list before the crash and then the island happened and names didn’t matter when survival was the only conversation. But standing here looking at her, three pounds and eleven ounces of fight inside an incubator in Grenada, I knew Mehar would have the perfect name. She always did. I just needed her to wake up and tell me what it was.
• • •
“You know who did this?” I asked Justice and Prime as they stood with me at the NICU window, all three of us staring through the glass at a baby who shouldn’t have had to fight this hard to be alive.
“It had to be the Rios cartel,” Justice responded.
“I want all of them dead. Every last person with the last name Rios, dead. Ion care if they’re two weeks old. Dead. I tried playing nice. I’m done. We in a war.” I said it flat because it wasn’t a threat. Threats have heat behind them. This was cold. This was arithmetic. They tried to kill my fiancée and my unborn child and even if my daughter survived she could face complications for the rest of her life because of what they did. And Mehar might still die. She was stable but stable wasn’t safe and I knew the difference between those two words now better than I ever wanted to.
“We on it. I hit up the Kings for intel and I’m waiting to hear from them,” Prime said.
“How you wanna carry this? You need to be here for Mehar and babygirl,” Justice asked.
“How good is this hospital even? Can I get them flown to the states? I want top medical care for them.” I couldn’t go to war until they were taken care of. And I’d be a nigga with fucked-up priorities if I left Mehar’s side right now. But the revenge was burning in me like something chemical, something that wouldn’t cool down on its own. It needed an outlet and the outlet was going to be every person connected to the Rios name.
“They both need to be stable before they can be transferred. So maybe in two days we can get them medevaced to the states,” Justice said.
“Set that up. Today. I want the best NICU in the country on standby and a medical transport team ready the second the doctors clear them to fly.”
“I’m on it.”
And there it was again. That pain in my chest that felt like my insides were collapsing. I could not lose another child. The thought hit me like a fist because it carried the weight of Quindon in it, the son I never got to raise, the boy who died because the world was cruel and I was powerless to stop it. And now my daughter was in an incubator breathing through a tube because someone decided my family hadn’t suffered enough.
I could not lose Mehar. I could not lose this baby. And the people who got me to this point would pay dearly with their lives.
The Rios family could’ve moved on. Could’ve accepted that Mateo fucked up by going after my girl. Could’ve chalked it up as a loss and rebuilt quietly the way smart people do when they’re outmatched. Instead they wanted revenge, and that revenge was going to cost them more than one philandering brother. It was going to cost them their entire empire. Every safe house, every supply line, every bank account, every person who carried that name or benefited from it. I was going to dismantle them the way you dismantle a building, floor by floor, until there was nothing left but the foundation and I was going to blow that up too.
Prime and Justice left to make calls. The hallway went quiet. And I walked to Mehar’s room alone.
• • •
She looked small in the hospital bed. The monitors tracked her heartbeat in green lines that rose and fell and rose and fell and I watched them the way I’d watched the tide on the island, looking for patterns, looking for proof that the rhythm would continue.She had a tube in her arm and a clip on her finger and her face was slack from the sedation, her lips slightly parted, her braids spread across the pillow in a mess that she would’ve hated if she could see it.
I thought about the island. About sitting under that palm tree with her while she ate a mango and I told her all the things we were going to have when we got home. More kids. Girl trips. Birthday parties. A full house. I’d painted a picture of a future that was big enough to keep her hope alive and now half of that picture had been cut out and she didn’t know yet. She was going to wake up and I was going to have to sit in this chair and tell her that our daughter was the only child she’d ever carry. That the doctors saved her life by taking something from her that she never got to choose to give. And I didn’t know how to say that. I didn’t know what words existed in any language that could make that okay.
I pulled a chair to the side of the bed, sat down, and took her hand. It was warm. Limp, but warm. I held it between both of mine and leaned forward and pressed my forehead against our stacked hands and closed my eyes.
All I could do was pray for her right now.
I couldn’t help Mehar. I couldn’t help my daughter. I couldn’t buy a solution or strategize an outcome or muscle my way through the biology of a premature birth and a postpartum hemorrhage. The only thing I had left was words directed at someone I’d spent my entire adult life ignoring, and I didn’t even know if He was listening.
But I tried.
The monitor beeped. Her chest rose and fell. The room was still.
I stayed like that for a long time, forehead pressed against her hand, eyes closed, mouth moving with words I didn’t plan and couldn’t stop. And somewhere between the begging andthe silence, something shifted inside me. Not peace exactly. Not faith. Just the faintest possibility that I wasn’t talking to an empty room.
I held onto that. It was all I had.
29
Serenity
