MY MIL STRAPPED A WATERMELON TO MY HUSBAND AFTER HE MOCKED MY PREGNANCY—THE NEXT MORNING, I WOKE UP AND GASPED AT WHAT I SAW.
MY MIL STRAPPED A WATERMELON TO MY HUSBAND AFTER HE MOCKED MY PREGNANCY—THE NEXT MORNING, I WOKE UP AND GASPED AT WHAT I SAW.
For nine months, my husband refused to touch my belly, skipped every ultrasound, and mocked me for crying over a sock, until his mother wrapped a watermelon around his waist and made him carry what I'd been carrying alone.
The next morning, I found him on his knees in the hallway beside two open suitcases, and I was certain my marriage was ending three weeks before our daughter was born.
But what was inside those suitcases led me to a box hidden in our garage, and to a tiny hospital bracelet from a baby I never knew my husband had lost.
CHAPTER 1: THIRTY-SIX WEEKS
At thirty-six weeks pregnant, I cried over a sock.
It had slipped behind the dryer. My lower back felt like someone had parked a truck on it. My husband, Reid, was standing two feet away, scrolling on his phone.
"Could you grab that?" I asked.
He barely looked up.
"You're pregnant, Hallie. You didn't lose your arms."
Then he walked out of the laundry room.
I stood there staring at the gap behind the dryer, and I cried. Not loud. Just tired, hot tears I couldn't stop.
My name is Hallie Lawton. I'm thirty-one. I'm a pharmacist at a hospital in Fairhaven. I work forty hours a week. So does Reid; he's an architect at a firm downtown. We've been married three years.
And somehow, during this entire pregnancy, only his evenings had belonged to him.
I cooked. I cleaned. I assembled the crib alone, sitting on the nursery floor at eight months with an Allen wrench and a YouTube video. Reid was "slammed at work." Reid was "wiped out." Reid had "a migraine."
In nine months, he'd never once come to an ultrasound. Not one. He always had a meeting.
He'd never once put his hand on my belly. When the baby kicked and I grabbed his hand to feel it, he'd pull away. Later. I'm tired.
He wouldn't go into the nursery. The door was always closed when I came home. Every time I opened it, I'd find it shut again by morning.
My friends said some men just aren't good at pregnancy. My mother said he'd come around once the baby was here. I told myself the same thing every night.
On Saturday morning, his mother, Patsy, drove up from Millbrook for a visit.
Patsy was sixty-two, small and sharp-eyed, a retired school nurse who'd raised three boys mostly by herself after her husband left. I'd always liked her. She never said much. She watched everything.
When she arrived, I was hauling a full laundry basket up from the basement, balancing it on my hip above my belly. Reid was on the couch with the football game on.
"Reid, can you carry this upstairs?"
"What exactly have you done all morning?" he asked, not looking away from the TV.
I started listing it, the way I always did. I hated that I always did.
"Breakfast. The dishes. Two loads of towels. I cleaned the bathroom. I —"
Patsy took the basket out of my hands.
"Why," she said to her son, "are you making her prove she's tired?"
Reid rolled his eyes. "Mom. You raised three kids. You never acted this helpless."
Patsy's face changed. Something went out of it. Something hard came in.
"You remember being taken care of, Reid," she said quietly. "You don't remember what it cost me."
Then she picked up her purse and walked out the front door.
Fifteen minutes later, she came back with a grocery bag. Inside were a watermelon, two small cantaloupes, and a roll of plastic wrap.
When she explained, Reid laughed out loud.
"You think I can't handle a little extra weight?"
"Then wear it," Patsy said, "while you do everything you expected her to do today."
He stood up, grinning. "Fine. Let's settle this."
Patsy held the watermelon against his stomach and wrapped it tight around his waist with the plastic wrap, over his T-shirt. Round and round. Then the cantaloupes against his chest.
He posed for me with his arms out like a bodybuilder.
"Still think you're special?"
Patsy handed him the laundry basket.
"Upstairs."
He took it. He was still smiling on the first step.
By the bottom rack of the dishwasher, he wasn't.
Bending over with twenty pounds strapped to his front, his face went red. He grunted. He had to put one hand on the counter.
Changing the fitted sheet on our bed left him sitting on the edge of the mattress, breathing hard, sweat on his forehead.
Then he dropped a sock.
He stood there looking down at it on the bedroom carpet.
I waited for the joke.
None came.
He tried to bend for it. Couldn't. Tried to squat. The watermelon got in the way. Finally he sat back down on the bed and just looked at that sock for a long time.
At lunch, he reached for the end of the plastic wrap.
"I need a break."
"So did she," Patsy said.
He looked at me.
I looked down at my soup.
But I noticed something strange that afternoon. Something I couldn't stop thinking about.
Every time he sat down to rest, Reid put both hands on that watermelon. Flat. Gently. Like he was holding something alive.
The way I'd always wished he would touch me.
At one point, I glanced into the living room and saw him sitting alone on the couch with his hands on the watermelon and his eyes closed. His lips were moving. I couldn't hear what he was saying.
Patsy was watching him too, from the kitchen doorway. Her eyes were wet.
That night, after Patsy cut the plastic wrap off and drove home, Reid barely spoke. He took a long shower. He got into bed and turned his back to me before I could say good night.
I lay awake for hours, staring at the ceiling, wondering how angry he was. Wondering if this was the thing that finally broke us.
The next morning, a sound woke me.
A zipper.
I pulled on my robe and waddled out into the hallway.
Reid was kneeling on the floor beside two open suitcases.
My stomach dropped through the floor.
"You're leaving?" I whispered. "Because of yesterday?"
He stopped. Looked up at me.
His eyes were red. He hadn't slept either.
And then I saw what was in the suitcases.
Not his clothes.
The first suitcase was mine. My hospital bag. The one on my list on the refrigerator that I hadn't had the energy to pack. Everything was there. My robe. Slippers. Nursing bras, still with tags. Phone charger. Lip balm. The good shampoo. The pillow from my side of the bed.
The second suitcase was tiny clothes. Onesies, folded in neat stacks. Socks the size of my thumb. Swaddle blankets. A going-home outfit, pale green, with ducks on it. I'd never seen it before. He must have bought it himself.
And on top, a little yellow knit cap.
"I'm not leaving, Hallie," Reid said. His voice cracked. "I'm finally getting ready."
I put my hand over my mouth.
He stood up slowly and, for the first time in nine months, without me asking, he put both his hands on my belly.
And the baby kicked him. Hard.
Reid let out a sound I'd never heard from him. Half laugh, half sob. Then he dropped to his knees in the hallway and pressed his forehead against my stomach and cried.
I cried too. I didn't understand what was happening. I just held his head and cried.
It wasn't until later, sitting on the hallway floor beside the suitcases, that I picked up the little yellow cap and turned it over.
Inside, stitched in white thread on the band, was a name.
LUCY.
Our daughter's name is going to be Nell.
CHAPTER 2: THE CHANGE
"Who's Lucy?" I asked.
Reid took the cap out of my hands. Gently. Fast.
"Nobody. It came that way. From the store. I'll find another one."
He put it in his pocket and went downstairs to make breakfast.
I sat on the hallway floor for a long time.
"Reid. It has a name in it. You can't buy a cap from a store with a name already in it."
"It was a custom shop. They messed up the order." He didn't turn around from the stove. "Do you want eggs?"
I let it go. I was thirty-six weeks pregnant and my husband was making me eggs without being asked for the first time in nine months. I wasn't about to ruin it.
But I didn't forget.
Over the next week, Reid became a different man.
He called his firm on Monday and took his paternity leave three weeks early. He did the laundry. He cooked dinner. He rubbed my back every night without being asked. He came to my thirty-seven-week appointment and sat beside me in the exam room, holding my hand so tight my fingers went numb.
When the nurse put the Doppler on my belly and the baby's heartbeat filled the room, whoosh-whoosh-whoosh, Reid went completely white.
He didn't move. He stared at the monitor like it might stop at any second. His hand was sweating in mine.
"It's perfect," the nurse said cheerfully. "A hundred and forty-two. Strong as anything."
Reid let out a breath like he'd been holding it for nine months.
In the parking lot afterward, he sat in the driver's seat without starting the car. He put his forehead on the steering wheel.
"Reid. Are you okay?"
"I'm fine. Just tired."
He wasn't fine.
He started checking on me at night. I'd wake up at two or three in the morning and find him lying on his side, awake, with his hand resting on my belly, just waiting. Waiting for a kick. When it came, he'd close his eyes.
One night, I heard him whisper something into the dark. So quiet I almost missed it.
"Please. Not this time."
On Tuesday evening, I came downstairs for water and heard his voice in the garage. He was on the phone, pacing between the cars. He didn't know I was there.
"...the same week, Mom," he was saying. His voice was raw. "Thirty-six. The exact same week. I can't breathe. Every time she doesn't move for an hour, I want to drive her to the emergency room." A pause. "No. I can't tell her. If I tell her now, she'll be terrified for the last month. I'm not doing that to her."
Another pause. Longer.
"I know you did it on purpose," he said quietly. "With the watermelon. I know. Thank you."
I backed away from the door before he could see me. I went upstairs without my water and lay in bed with my heart pounding.
The same week.
The same week as what?
On Thursday, he finally opened the nursery door. He stood in the doorway for a long time looking at the crib I'd built alone. Then he walked in and sat in the rocking chair, and stayed there for an hour, not moving.
I didn't know whether to be happy or terrified.
He installed the car seat in the back of my SUV three separate times. He read the manual cover to cover. He watched two videos. He had a firefighter at the station on Elm Street check it. Then he went back two days later and asked the firefighter to check it again.
"Most dads just want to get it in," the firefighter told me, laughing, while Reid knelt in the back seat tugging on the straps. "Your husband wants it bolted to the earth's core."
He packed the hospital bags, unpacked them, and repacked them. He made a laminated list and taped it to the inside of the front door. Bags. Car seat. Insurance card. Hallie's pillow. Phone chargers. Snacks (the good pretzels).
At the bottom, in smaller letters, he'd written something else and then scribbled it out. I held the list up to the light to read it.
Don't panic. Don't leave the room. Whatever happens.
My friend Marisa came over on Wednesday to drop off a casserole and found Reid on a stepladder in the nursery, hanging a mobile of little felt clouds.
"Okay," she whispered to me in the kitchen. "What happened? Did aliens take your husband? Because I'd like to borrow them."
I laughed. But I didn't know how to answer her. I didn't know what had happened either. I only knew it had started with a watermelon, and that every time I looked at him lately, he looked like a man walking very carefully across thin ice.
Patsy called me that Friday.
"How is he?" she asked. Not how are you. How is he.
"Different," I said. "Better. Strange. Patsy, did something happen with Reid? Something I don't know about?"
There was a long pause on the line.
"That's for Reid to tell you, sweetheart," she said finally. "Not me."
CHAPTER 3: THE BOX IN THE GARAGE
On Sunday afternoon, Reid went to the hardware store to pick up a car-seat mirror. I went out to the garage to look for my old maternity pillow in the storage bins.
That morning, something small had been nagging at me.
I'd been scrolling through Reid's Facebook page, looking for a photo of us from our wedding to frame for the nursery. He almost never posted. But every March, for years, there was a comment from the same old college friend of his, a guy named Tom whom I'd met once at our wedding.
Always the same few words. Always in March.
Thinking of you this week, buddy.
Never anything else. No explanation. Reid never replied.
I'd seen those comments before and never thought twice. Now, with a cap that said LUCY sitting in my husband's pocket, they sat strangely in my chest.
I'd never gone through Reid's side of the garage shelves. They were his. Old college textbooks. Camping gear. Boxes from his apartment before we got married.
Behind a crate of hiking boots, on the very top shelf, was a small, plain cardboard box. Taped shut. On the side, in faded marker, in Reid's handwriting: DON'T.
I almost put it back.
I didn't.
Inside, wrapped in tissue paper, were a few small things.
A sympathy card, signed by a dozen names I didn't recognize.
A tiny plastic hospital bracelet. BABY GIRL LAWTON. 36 WKS. ST. AGATHA'S MEDICAL CENTER. A date ten years ago. In March.
A second yellow knit cap. Identical to the one in the suitcase. LUCY, stitched on the band.
A black-and-white photograph. A blurry ultrasound. Written on the bottom in a woman's handwriting: Lucy at 20 weeks. Hi, Daddy.
And a folded piece of paper. A funeral program. Small. Simple. In Loving Memory of Lucy Rose Lawton. One date. Just one. Born and died on the same day.
And then, sitting there, other things came back to me. Things I'd never put together.
Every March, for the three years we'd been married, Reid went fishing alone for a weekend. Up north, at a cabin his family used to rent. He never invited me. He always came back quiet and sunburned and wouldn't talk about it for days.
The first time, I'd been hurt. By the third, I'd stopped asking.
Every March. Thinking of you this week, buddy.
The bracelet in my hand said March.
He hadn't been fishing.
He'd been going somewhere to be alone with her.
I held the ultrasound photo up to the light. A tiny profile. A little upturned nose. Hi, Daddy.
It looked almost exactly like the one stuck to our refrigerator. Nell, at twenty weeks. The one Reid had never once looked at long enough to comment on.
Now I understood why he couldn't.
I sat down on the cold garage floor with the box in my lap.
Baby Girl Lawton.
Ten years ago. Before I ever met him.
Reid had had a baby. A daughter. With someone else.
And he'd never told me.
Three years of marriage. Nine months of pregnancy. Every ultrasound he skipped. Every time he pulled his hand away. Every later, I'm tired.
He'd been keeping a dead child from me the whole time.
I didn't know whether I was grieving or furious. Both. I couldn't breathe.
I read the funeral program again. At the bottom, in small italic letters, was a line of poetry. Some people only stay a moment, and change the world forever.
And under that, one name I'd never heard before. Lovingly remembered by her parents, Jenna and Reid.
My hands were shaking so badly the paper rattled.
Who was the mother? Did he love her? Was that why he couldn't love this? Was I just the second try at something he'd lost?
My phone was in my pocket. I called Patsy.
She answered on the first ring.
"Patsy," I said. My voice was shaking. "Who is Lucy?"
The silence on the line went on for so long I thought she'd hung up.
"Come to my house," she said finally. Her voice was very quiet. "Now. And bring the box."
I put the box on the passenger seat of my car and drove the forty minutes to Millbrook with both hands gripping the wheel. Every few miles, the baby kicked, hard, like she was asking what was wrong.
"I don't know, sweetheart," I whispered to her. "I don't know yet."
At a stoplight, I looked over at the box. DON'T. in my husband's handwriting.
I thought about every time I'd begged him to come to an ultrasound. Every time he'd said he had a meeting. Every time I'd cried in the car afterward, alone in the hospital parking garage, holding a printout of our daughter's face and wondering why her father didn't want to see it.
He hadn't been choosing a meeting over us.
He'd been choosing not to walk back into the room where his first daughter died.
I didn't know yet if that made it better or worse.
CHAPTER 4: THIRTY-SIX WEEKS, AGAIN
Patsy's little house in Millbrook smelled like coffee and lavender. She sat me down at her kitchen table and set the box between us. She didn't open it. She looked at it for a long time.
"Her name was Jenna," Patsy said. "Reid was twenty-four. They'd been together two years. They weren't married. They were going to be. She got pregnant, and Reid..." She smiled faintly. "Hallie, you should have seen him. He went to every single appointment. He talked to her belly every night. He painted the nursery yellow. He bought those caps. He picked her name. Lucy. After my mother."
I couldn't speak.
"At thirty-six weeks," Patsy said, "Jenna noticed the baby wasn't moving as much. They went in. There was no heartbeat." Her voice broke. "The cord. A knot in the cord. Nothing anyone could have done. Nothing anyone could have seen. She delivered Lucy two days later. Reid held her. For an hour."
Thirty-six weeks.
The same week as the sock behind the dryer.
"Jenna couldn't stay with him after," Patsy said. "Every time she looked at him, she saw that room. She moved back home to her parents in another state. They don't speak anymore. Reid packed the nursery into that one little box and never talked about it again. Not to me. Not to his brothers. Not to anyone."
The front door opened.
Reid stood in the doorway with a car-seat mirror in a hardware store bag. He saw me at the table. He saw the box.
His face went through something terrible.
He set the bag down on the floor very carefully.
"I was going to tell you," he said hoarsely. "Before we got married. I tried a dozen times. And then you told me you wanted kids, and you were so happy, and I thought, if I tell her, she'll be scared the whole time. Like me. And I didn't want that for you."
"So you were scared alone," I whispered.
He sat down across from me. He looked so tired.
"When you got pregnant," he said, "I couldn't do it again, Hallie. Not the way I did with Lucy. I couldn't go to the ultrasounds. I couldn't feel her kick. I couldn't open that nursery door. Because last time, I let myself love her so much. And when she was gone..." He pressed his palms against his eyes. "I thought if I kept my distance, if I didn't let myself get attached, then if something happened, it wouldn't kill me this time. And it wouldn't kill you, watching me fall apart."
"So you made me do it all by myself."
"Yes." His voice cracked. "And the closer we got to thirty-six weeks, the worse I got. I was so scared I could barely look at you. When you cried over that sock, I wanted to grab you and never let go. And instead, I said the worst thing I could think of, so I could walk out of the room."
"Every March," I said. "The fishing trips."
He nodded without looking up. "There's a cemetery near the cabin. In Pine Hollow. She's buried there. I bring her flowers on her birthday. Yellow ones." He swallowed. "I sit there and tell her what happened that year. I told her about you, the first March. I told her you were pregnant, this March." His voice cracked completely. "I told her I was scared."
I looked at Patsy. She was crying silently.
"And the watermelon?" I asked her.
"I knew what week it was," Patsy said softly. "I knew exactly what my son was running from. I've watched him do it for nine months." She wiped her eyes. "I couldn't tell you his secret. It wasn't mine. But I thought, if he couldn't let himself feel that baby, maybe he could feel her weight. Just for one day. Maybe if he carried it, he'd stop being afraid to hold it."
Reid looked at his mother.
"I felt her," he said, barely a whisper. "Yesterday. With that stupid watermelon. All day. And I kept thinking about Lucy. About how much she weighed when they put her in my arms. Five pounds, two ounces. And I realized I'd been so busy being afraid of losing this baby that I was letting her mother carry everything alone." He looked at me with red eyes. "Including me."
That was why he'd rested his hands on the watermelon. Why his lips had been moving.
He'd been talking to Lucy.
CHAPTER 5: NELL
Patsy walked me out to my car afterward. Reid stayed inside. He said he needed a minute alone.
"Hallie," Patsy said, holding my arm at the curb. "I know you're angry. You have every right to be. I'd be furious." She looked back at the house. "But I want you to know something. After Lucy, I watched that boy stop living for two years. He went to work. He came home. He slept. That's all. I thought I'd lost him too." Her voice wavered. "Then he met you. And he started laughing again. You brought him back, sweetheart. He was just too scared to tell you what you'd brought him back from."
I didn't forgive him right away.
I was angry. Not at the grief. At the silence. At three years of him deciding what I could handle. At nine months of being made to feel like my pregnancy was a burden, when really it was a ghost.
We drove home from Patsy's in silence. That night, I slept in the nursery, in the rocking chair, with my hand on my belly.
Around eleven, there was a soft knock on the door.
Reid came in and sat on the floor beside the rocking chair. He didn't say anything for a long time.
"I'm sorry," he finally said. "Not just for Lucy. For all of it. For the sock. For the laundry basket. For every single thing I made you prove."
"You don't get to decide what I can carry, Reid."
"I know."
"I would have been scared. Yes. But I'd have been scared with you. That's what this is supposed to be."
He nodded. His eyes were wet.
"Will you tell me about her?" I asked. "Lucy?"
He looked up at me, surprised.
Then, sitting on the floor of our daughter's nursery, my husband told me about his first daughter. Her dark hair. Her tiny fingernails. How she'd fit entirely in his two hands. How he'd sung to her, badly, for the whole hour, because he didn't know what else to do.
When he finished, it was nearly two in the morning.
"I want her to know about Lucy," I said. "Someday. And I want to go with you. In March. To Pine Hollow."
Reid looked at me for a long time.
"You'd do that?"
"She's Nell's sister," I said. "That makes her mine too."
He put his head down on my knee, there on the nursery floor, and I put my hand in his hair, and for a long time neither of us said anything at all.
That's when my water broke.
Thirty-seven weeks and two days.
Reid was on his feet before I'd finished gasping. He grabbed both suitcases. He grabbed the car keys. He grabbed my hand.
"Okay," he said. "Okay. We're going. I've got you. I've got both of you."
I'd never heard his voice so steady.
The drive to Fairhaven General was eleven minutes. Reid did it in nine, with both hands on the wheel and the hazards blinking, talking the whole time in that new, steady voice.
"Breathe, Hal. In for four. Good. Out for four. We're almost there. Look, there's the sign. You're doing great."
At a red light, a contraction hit so hard I grabbed the door handle and moaned. Reid reached over and held the back of my neck.
"I'm right here," he said. "I'm not going anywhere. You hear me? Not one step."
At the hospital entrance, he jumped out before the car fully stopped, ran around, and helped me out of the passenger seat. A nurse came out with a wheelchair. Reid grabbed both suitcases out of the back seat, one in each hand, and followed us through the automatic doors.
At the front desk, the receptionist asked for our insurance card.
Reid pulled the laminated list off his phone case, where he'd taped it, and read it out loud like a checklist. Bags. Car seat. Insurance card. He handed it over.
"First baby?" the receptionist asked kindly.
Reid hesitated. Just for a second.
"Second," he said quietly. "Our second."
I squeezed his hand.
Labor took fourteen hours. Around hour ten, the baby's heart rate dipped on the monitor. Just for a moment. The nurse adjusted my position. The line came back up.
I looked at Reid. He'd gone gray. His hand was crushing mine.
Two nurses came in fast. Then the doctor. They had me roll onto my left side. They put an oxygen mask over my face. The room filled with quiet, quick voices.
I watched Reid. I watched the old terror come up in his eyes, the thirty-six-week terror, the ten-year-old terror. His whole body went rigid. His knuckles went white on the bed rail.
He looked at the door.
For one second, I was sure he was going to walk through it.
But he didn't leave. He didn't look away. He leaned close and put his forehead against mine.
"She's okay," I whispered to him. "Look at the screen, Reid. She's okay."
He looked at the screen. He watched the line go up and down. Whoosh-whoosh-whoosh. He nodded.
At 4:12 p.m., Nell Patricia Lawton was born. Seven pounds, three ounces. Screaming her head off. Pink. Furious. Perfectly, impossibly alive.
The nurse laid her on my chest.
Reid stood beside the bed, staring at her. His whole body was shaking.
"Do you want to hold her?" the nurse asked him.
He hesitated. For one terrible second, I saw ten years of fear on his face.
Then he held out his arms.
The nurse placed our daughter in them. Reid looked down at her. Nell opened her eyes, dark and blurry, and looked right back up at him.
And my husband started to sing to her. Badly. Off-key. Some old song I didn't know.
I knew, without asking, that he'd sung the same song once before. In a different room. Ten years ago.
EMOTIONAL ENDING
A week after Nell came home, Reid sat at the kitchen table for a long time with a pen and a blank card. When he finally showed me what he'd written, it was short.
Jenna — We had a little girl last week. Her name is Nell. She has dark hair, like Lucy did. I wanted you to hear it from me. I hope you're happy. I hope you've found peace. I think about her every day. I think you probably do too. — Reid
"Should I send it?" he asked me.
"Yes," I said.
He mailed it to an old address in another state. We never heard back. He didn't seem to need to.
"I just didn't want her to read it on Facebook," he said. "She was Lucy's mom. She deserves to know."
I fell a little more in love with him, standing at that mailbox.
Later, when the nurses had cleaned us up and the room was quiet, Reid sat in the recliner beside my bed with Nell asleep on his chest. Every few minutes, he'd lower his head and listen.
"She's breathing," I said softly.
"I know." He didn't lift his head. "I just like hearing it."
"Reid. Are you okay?"
He was quiet for a long time.
"Ten years ago," he said, "I held a baby girl in a room like this for one hour. She never opened her eyes. She never made a sound." He touched Nell's back with one finger. "This one won't stop yelling at me."
I laughed. He laughed too. Then he cried, quietly, with our daughter on his chest, and I let him.
"Thank you," he said, "for not giving up on me. Even when I deserved it."
Patsy came to the hospital that evening with a bag of real food and a bouquet of grocery-store tulips. When she saw Reid sitting in the recliner with Nell asleep on his bare chest, his hand spread across her whole back, she stopped in the doorway and covered her mouth.
"Hi, Mom," Reid said softly. "Meet Nell."
Patsy came and knelt beside the recliner. She touched Nell's tiny fist with one finger. Then she looked up at her son, and something passed between them that didn't need any words.
"Patricia," I said from the bed. "Her middle name. For the woman who made her daddy carry a watermelon."
Patsy laughed until she cried.
When we brought Nell home, Reid put the little box from the garage on the top shelf of the nursery. Not hidden this time. Open. The tiny hospital bracelet. The yellow cap. The ultrasound. Hi, Daddy.
"I want her to know she had a big sister," Reid said. "Someday. When she's old enough."
"She will," I said.
On the shelf beside the box, he put the second yellow cap, the one that had been sitting on top of the suitcase that morning. He'd bought it ten years ago, a matching pair, one for the hospital and one for home. Lucy had only ever needed one.
He'd carried the other one for ten years, in a box marked DON'T.
Now he took a white thread and a needle from my sewing kit, sat in the rocking chair while Nell napped, and very carefully, very badly, stitched a second name onto the band, right under the first.
LUCY
& NELL
He held it up to show me. The stitches were crooked. One letter was bigger than the others.
"Sisters," he said.
Every night now, Reid gives Nell her bath. He does the laundry. He gets up for every two a.m. feeding, even when it's my turn.
And sometimes, when I can't sleep, I find him standing over her crib in the dark, with one hand resting very gently on her chest.
May you like
Not afraid anymore.
Just feeling her breathe.
