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“Well, you could tell me what you remember,” I suggested. “I mean, if you do remember any of it.”
We’d asked the same of Kingston, but he only remembered seeing Gena go down and the fight that followed. Melony had been prepared to shift and had done so quickly.
“She was out of her clothes and into her wolf form while I was still trying to figure out what was going on.” That’s what Kingston had told Xander in a rasp, right out of surgery.
If Gena’s side of the story provided anything new that Kingston’s had missed, it could be the break we needed.
“You’ve already heard most of it in the report, I imagine. That FBI lady took my statement once I was conscious enough to give one.”
“Of course,” I said. “But is there anything you might have remembered since? Anything they might have missed?”
“There is one thing.” She grimaced. “It’s kind of ridiculous. Like, I feel like I might have misheard. Or made it up.”
“Tell me anyway?” I pleaded. “Anything is better than nothing right now.”
“Right before it all happened… I think Melony called the boys her babies.” Her grimace shifted to a look of outright disgust. “I think that’s what she said, anyway. Give me my baby back. After that, though—I’ve got nothing. That’s probably when she hit me with the rock.”
My heart dropped. “She thinks my sons are… hers?”
“It’s gross, I know. Delulu queen.” Gena rolled her eyes, then rubbed the back of her head. “Like I said, I might not have heard her right. I’m not sure it will make a difference either way. But if that is what she said, and if she thinks they’re hers, maybe it means she’s taking care of them, right?”
“I guess.” A bitter taste filled my mouth. Beneath it, anger seared across my chest, making even my bones feel constricted around my heart and lungs. “But they’re not hers. She didn’t carry them. She didn’t give birth to them…”
Tears brimmed in my eyes as a rogue wave of emotion struck. And here I’d thought I was done crying, only for the ability to return to me with a vengeance now, of all times.
Give me my baby back.
My fingers curled into tight, angry fists.,
“God, Gena, I spent most of my first trimester barely able to keep a single bite of food down! I spent my first moments of labor with my fingers in Xander’s mom’s throat after Melony’s father tried to rip it out! And after all that, she just waltzed into my life and took my children away because she felt like it? Because she wanted them? Because she could?”
“I know, babe. I know.” A whimper left Gena’s throat. When she wrapped her arms around me, I realized she was crying, too. “I hate her for everything she’s done to you. This, though? She’s not going to get away with it. I can feel it. Can’t you?”
I didn’t answer, my throat too clogged with tears. They burned in my eyes and fell down my cheeks in fat dollops.
This couldn’t be the thing that broke me. I tried desperately to calm myself, but every time I tried to stop sobbing, my brain supplied me with fresh material that only made everything worse.
Melony rocking my babies to sleep at night. Melony changing their diapers, watching them roll over for the first time, hearing the first sounds of their baby babble, their first words. Melony, deranged and delusional, trying to breastfeed them. That one made me want to puke. A baby’s first real smile happened around the one-month mark, I recalled. When they were taken, Rylan and Ryder hadn’t smiled for us yet. When they did smile for the first time, would they be staring up at Melony’s face instead of mine? How many other milestones of theirs would we miss because some lunatic I barely knew had taken one look at my family and decided that I not only didn’t deserve it, but in fact, she was going to take it for herself?
I cried in Gena’s arms, hyperventilating and sick with my own grief, for what felt like an hour. An eternity. I wasn’t sure I would ever stop.
But the thing about tears, I’d come to realize over the last several days, was that eventually, no matter how bad they got, they always gave out in the end.
“Oh, God,” I breathed in horror when I finally sobered up. “I’m getting snot all over you.”
“Hon, we’re nurses.” Gena pulled back and wiped my tears away with her thumbs. “We’ve both been covered in a lot worse.”
A ragged, unexpected laugh leaped from my throat. She was right, of course. A little snot wasn’t enough to faze either of us. It was a gross joke, but exactly the one I’d needed.
“Thank you,” I whispered. Every breath I drew, I tried to focus on making it deep and slow. “I cried so much that first day, I haven’t been able to since. I… I think I needed that.”
“Maybe we both did,” she said. Her own eyes were red and puffy, too. “I still can’t imagine a worse thing happening to a better person, you know. Just remember you’re not alone.”
We spent the next several minutes composing ourselves, the same way millions of other women did every day. Gena produced a box of tissues. We dried our eyes. She got me a glass of water. I sipped at it, thinking about how, on a different timeline, in a different life, we could have just as easily been two women in a funeral home bathroom at the wake of a friend, or two teenage girls fixing our makeup after being stood up for the junior prom. We would have recovered from our tears in more or less the same way.
Blot the mascara. Blow the nose. Choke down the grief so you could return to the world with a brave face. Maybe that was the hallmark of womanhood: holding it together until you couldn’t help but break down, then putting all your pieces back into place like it had never happened at all.
“How’s Kingston doing?” Gena asked as I got ready to head out. My brave face was on again. So was hers.
