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“We’re in here!” I yell even harder this time, the commotion closer to us now.
“I love you… You better tell your baby all about me.”
“Goddamnit, Hanna! Fight! You have to fight! You have to tell them yourself!”
“Tell Finn… tell him I want him to forgive himself. And you… too.”
Her breaths are not breaths anymore. Only a wheezing noise that doesn’t pass through her throat.
“Hanna?”No, no, no.“Hanna?!” There’s no light in her eyes… “Hanna!!!”
A desperate cry splinters the air, just as light fills the room. Moments later, warmth envelops me, my throat raw, but I can’t stop the onslaught of wails. My lungs are constricted by the grip around me, but I can’t stop crying, bellowing, and begging the gods to bring her back. That warmth holds me tighter, wrapping me in a protective shield as all I can do is break.
Someone falls on the other side of her, gripping her beautiful face, swiping the stray hairs back.
Finnigan…
I’m struggling to see, my vision blurry, like I’m underwater with no goggles. Even so, it’s impossible not to recognize it in him—agony. It’s filling me too right now, the type that burrows inside of you and demands a home. It marks you. Taking away something precious, irreplaceable.
He gathers her in his arms, holding her bloody, broken body to his chest, speaking to her in loving, begging tones.
But she doesn’t hear him.
She’ll never hear him again.
She’ll never hear me… see me… give me her sassy looks with her perfectly trimmed cocked eyebrows. She’ll never light up a room again.
She’ll never be…
I can’t pry my eyes off her, afraid she’ll disappear for the final time. I can’t… I sit there on the cold floor, crying as Ronan kisses my forehead and whispers things to me that I can’t understand. He might as well speak a different language, all of them could. He rips his t-shirt and ties scraps around my bleeding thighs, then wraps me in his jacket. There’s silence in my eardrums, my throat sore and scratchy, my eyes dull and burning from all the tears.
I think they ask me questions. Or maybe Ronan does. But speaking just seems… wrong. Blasphemous. Why do we deserve to have a voice when hers was so brutally taken away in an instant?
I’m lifted off the ground completely, watching as Finnigan does the same to the only friend who has ever meant anything to me.
I’m forced to break eye contact as I’m carried out the door. When the smell of rusty metal combines with wet grass, I finally turn to Ronan. I thought there was nothing left of me to break, but his gaze proves me wrong. More of me shatters at the conflict marring his eyes. Gratitude tears him apart, the rips filling to the brim with agonizing guilt.
The same one that begins to drown me.
It’s all my fault…
Every broken piece of me sinks with the excruciating weight of this shame.
I’m still here.Weare here. My body is warm. Alive. Cradled in his arms. We have a chance, a future together. And Hanna has nothing…
How are we supposed to carry on in this unfair universe? How am I supposed to bring a child into this world when my first memories of them in my belly are filled with violence and grief?
“I’m sorry,” Ronan whispers.
Me too.
I can’t seem to say it, though.
Our lives are forever changed. In such cruel, contradictory ways.
I drop my head to his shoulder and let myself get carried away to wherever this pain can fester in peace.
CHAPTER 16
