He was nervous about meeting Mason’s father. But he also couldn’t wait. Danyl wanted to tell Mason’s father just how much he loved her, how much he wanted to take care of her, and just how much he wanted to marry her.
He walked back into the sitting room to find Mason looking out of the large floor-to-ceiling windows, and paused. He sometimes found her here, almost tucked behind the curtain, as if afraid to stand fully in front of it. He wasn’t sure if it was because she felt safer in the shadows, or if it was the shadows that drew her. But he was reluctant to intrude on those thoughts. He’d tried once, and she’d avoided telling him what was on her mind. And ever since then, it felt as if it was something private, something she didn’t want him to see.
‘Mason?’
‘I’ve been thinking,’ she replied without looking at him. He never knew what she would say when she was like this. It could be anything from dinner plans to a scathing critique of his latest college essay. Anything and all of it was welcome as it cut through the silence that covered her like a shawl.
‘Mmm?’ he prompted, walking over to her, lending her his warmth and strength as he pulled her back against his chest.
‘What do you think of the name Faaris?’
‘Faaris as in...?’
She turned, and a small smile pulled at her lips, but her eyes were bright and shining.
‘As in knight... I think. Translation apps aren’t always—’
‘It’s perfect,’ Danyl replied, prising his tongue from the roof of his mouth. ‘It also means hero,’ he added. The name had taken him by surprise, but it probably shouldn’t have. ‘You think we’re having a boy?’
‘I think we’re having a football player, whatever the gender,’ she said, laughing and rubbing her stomach.
‘You’ve felt the baby kick?’
‘No, silly. It’s too early. But I’ve definitely felt something. Perhaps just the warm-up, but—’
He stopped her words with a passionate kiss. One that took them all the way into the bedroom, for a very long time.
Mason woke in the middle of the night and nearly cried out. The sharp cut of pain low in her belly was unbearable. She reached out to Danyl, who woke immediately. She knew the grip on his arm was strong, but the moment his eyes locked on to hers she saw the terror that she felt reflected in him, before another wave of pain crashed through her body. If she cried out, she couldn’t tell, but Danyl was suddenly a blur of activity. He grabbed his phone, and for a moment she couldn’t quite understand what he was doing. The words he shouted into the phone were unintelligible beyond the pain, the fear. Her hands were at her stomach, her whole body curling in on itself as if to try and contain, trying to protect.
The taste of fear stung her throat and tongue. Bitter, acidic. She was trembling now, tears falling freely down her cheeks. No, no, no. It was a mantra in her mind, tumbling out into the dark bedroom of the apartment.
She shook her head against the thought, as if that would stop whatever was happening. She refused to give it voice, refused to think it, superstition and desperation warring in her breast.
Danyl picked her up and carried her through the apartment, into the lift and down into a car in the underground car park, faces and figures surrounding them all a blur. She buried her head into Danyl’s shoulder, refusing to let her mind stop on a single thought, wanting to block out everything, the pain, thoughts, the past and the future. She couldn’t let her mind rest on a single thought, because if she did...
Danyl’s soothing words of reassurance disappeared into the night, carried away on the air as blurred lights faded in and out of her mind while the car swept through the dark, empty streets. It was as if they were the only people in the whole world and she clung to his shirt in desperation as yet another wave of pain took away hope, took away a future she had only just let herself believe was possible.
* * *
Mason closed her eyes against the bright white lights of the room around her. She never wanted to open them again. Perhaps if she didn’t, it wouldn’t be real. It would all go away. Monitors beeped into the silky, numbing cocoon that had descended over her mind. It would all go away. She just needed it all to go away.
People were talking in the corner of the room and she just wanted them to shut up. Anger, fury, grief was a heady concoction sticking to her skin, to her arms, to her body, hurting and fighting in her chest, her heart. A heart that felt as if it had been irrevocably damaged. As if nothing would ever be the same again. A sob racked her body, tears that should have been exhausted by now fell from her closed eyes, down her cheeks, and she didn’t have the energy or the desire to wipe them away.
The smell of disinfectant, of cleaning products, dripped into her stomach, nausea not far behind. She curled in on herself once again, her hands going to her womb, where the tiny flutter of life that she’d once held on to so strongly wasn’t there any more. She tried to bite back the moan that came from the deepest part of her heart, she tried to contain it, not to let it loose, but she couldn’t.
She wanted to scream. To shout, to cry, to fight, but the fight was already over. She knew, in some distant, rational part of her mind, that she needed to stop, that there were things she needed to do. But she couldn’t.
There was nothing left now. Nothing in her belly and nothing between her and Danyl, other than a grief she could barely even begin to allow herself to feel.
The noise in the background stopped, a door opened and closed, and she felt a dip in the
bed beside her. Danyl’s smell wrapped around her, just as his arms did, pulling her back into his chest. And she let go.
* * *
Danyl pulled her against his body in the back of the limousine. He hadn’t been able to stop doing that since she’d woken in the middle of the night. It was as if he needed her there, pressed against him, felt that perhaps she needed it too. He felt the tremors through his body as if they were his own. If he was honest, they could have been. He just couldn’t get his head round it. It was impossible. He shook his head against the words the doctor had spoken, and stopped. He didn’t want to wake Mason, who had seemed barely able to open her eyes as they walked from the hospital room out to the waiting car. She’d been inconsolable. He’d not really given much thought to that word before. But now he knew. Truly, he knew what it meant. Grief, loss, helplessness—it all ate away at him, taking pieces of the future he thought he’d have and eventually reducing it to nothing.
Guilt. Guilt was the hardest one. How had he failed to protect Mason, how had he failed to protect his child?