I sobbed. “I’m sorry,” I cried. I didn’t know what else to say. I couldn’t make this better. If I could, I would have made myself better a long fucking time ago.
“Ah, baby girl, no,” Stephen whispered.
I looked up at him through blurry eyes as he quickly moved toward me. A mix between a broken wail and a sob ripped from my lips as soon as his hands touched me. He lifted me into his arms and carried me to our room. Seth abruptly sat up, blinking for a moment at us. “Fuck,” he finally whispered.
Stephen laid me down on the bed, and together, he and Seth held me all while I clutched my baby’s teddy bear, crying and wishing I knew how to be a better mom so it wouldn’t be stuck with someone as fucked up as me.
“We’re here, baby girl,” Seth soothed, pressing his lips to my forehead.
“Just let it out,” Stephen coaxed from behind me.
I just cried harder because if I could let go of the demons that were holding me down, I wouldn’t be crying in the first place.
14
Seth
She wasn’t ready.
Honestly, I don’t think any of us were, but Bailey?
She definitely wasn’t.
She hadn’t stopped crying since the doctor confirmed she was in labor. It was taking everything in me not to break down with her. Stephen and I were doing our best to keep her together, but it wasn’t working.
She was spiraling. And fucking fast. There wasn’t a fucking thing I could do to slow it down. She alternated between crying so hard she could barely speak and panicking.
I’d been hopeful. After she cried over our baby in the nursery, she’d been a bit more open to becoming a mom, to loving our baby. Granted, she still had bad days, but she talked to us about the baby a little more instead of always clamming up.
But today, that all changed.
“Baby girl, I just need you to breathe. It’s going to be okay,” I assured her, but I wished like hell I believed those words myself. Because looking at her? Iknewnothing was going to be okay.
She pushed my hands away when I reached for her, fucking tearing my soul apart. “I want Trent,” she cried. She looked around the room desperately as she searched for her brother, her eyes haunted and filled with agony. “I want my brother!”
Without a word and without revealing anything he was truly feeling, Stephen quickly left the room, going to get Trent for Bailey. She hadn’t asked for him since she moved in with us. We’d been doing so good keeping her grounded.
Today, we lost all of that, but there was nothing that we could do to help it. This baby was coming whether she wanted it to or not. This was no longer something she could shove under the rug in her mind.
Our baby was about to be born.
And I knew with every fiber of my being that it was going to destroy her. I was going to have our baby in my arms, but in the process, I knew I was going to lose her. And it was fucking killing me.
Trent stepped into the room. He didn’t say a word to me. He walked straight to Bailey and sat on the bed beside her, holding her in his protective embrace.
And it fucking shattered me because I’d been trying to hold her for two hours now, and she had just kept pushing me away.
She didn’t want me. I understood it, but it didn’t make that shit cut any less deep. I’d done this to her. I’d gotten her pregnant, broken her, and I couldn’t fucking put her pieces back together.
She was like thisbecause of me.
She’d even started going to therapy. God,allof us had been so proud of her for sticking to her therapy sessions, for taking the medication her doctor prescribed to her.
But her therapist had warned us that on delivery day, Bailey might lose every bit of progress she had made because she wasn’t coping. And she tried. Goddammit, Baileytriedto cope.
But she couldn’t cope with this. She didn’t know how. The therapist never stopped working with her, butfuck, Bailey’s mind had a goddamn block up.
“I’m here, little sis. It’s okay. Just breathe. I’ve got you,” Trent soothed.