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“Léonie, no, I’m here for you—breathe—” I tried to say.

And I realized as my knees gave way and I barely missed hitting the bottom of the bed.

That I hadn’t been the one practicing breathing with her.

I didn’t have the first fucking suggestion for her.

That it wasn’t me at all. It had been my brother to support her through one of the most vulnerable times in her life.

If I thought every moment leading up to this was my lowest, it was still nothing to the feeling of watching my wife in labor and have her not look at me once.

I wasn’t her rock—my brother was.

Her eyes never wavered from his, only breaking their eye contact when she closed hers in pain.

The doctor came. Nurses came. They set up a bewildering amount of equipment.

And I didn’t recognize them. Didn’t recognize any of them. Didn’t know anything.

Even though this was my wife. My baby.

I waited in an agony, my voice unheeded, unremembered, unneeded.

Hour after hour her labor progressed, Hugo encouraging her to go into different positions, bounce on the ball, then she ended up on all fours on the bed.

And I wasn’t needed at all. She didn’t care that I was here for her.

The last thing I remembered was the sight of a dark, jet-black head of hair emerging as my wife pushed, clutching Hugo’s hand so tightly that the veins stood out under her pale white skin.

My child, my son.

“Léonie—“ I gasped, but there was an arm around my throat and I felt Mano choking me.

“What do you want me to do with him—” was the last thing I heard before all was darkness.

I woke on the forest floor again, staggering to my knees on the other side of the gate.

Locked away from my wife and child.

Mano was sitting on a tree stump smoking.

“I could have fucking killed you while you were out,” he said. “No one could have blamed me for killing a man with léger written on his forehead. Fucking lunatic.”

“Why didn’t you, then?” I asked savagely, grabbing the cigarette and taking a long, painful drag.

My head was throbbing and my lungs burned.

“Our fucking weak brother Hugo had to tell me some story about when we were kids—how I fell into some ravine and everyone was looking for me—you were the one to find me and pull me out.”

I looked away.

“Hugo is soft,” I said.

“Yeah,” Mano said.

But I remembered it. Later I’d acted like it hadn’t mattered—like plucking your little brother out of a deep ravine didn’t affect me at all.

But at the time—tears had sprung to my eyes and when I wiped them away with the back of my hand Mme had frowned at me. I couldn’t have been more than 4 or 5, but I still remembered it clearly.