Annoyingly, tears were brimming in her eyes. She didn't want to give her friend the wrong impression, she couldn’t wait to meet Naomi’s baby, but itdidbring back memories. Memories that she was so conflicted about. On the one hand, they were so painful that it hurt, physically hurt, to think about. And yet on the other hand, if someone offered to remove those memories she would refuse.
She didn't want to forget.
“You’ve never shown me pictures of her, and you never talk about them,” Naomi said.
Thinking about them was hard enough but talking about them was almost more than she could bear. She and Naomi had met not long after she’d lost her family, when they had both joined the police academy, and had immediately gravitated toward each other because they could both be quite obsessive about always being busy and on the move. Even after they graduated and Naomi decided not to become a cop, the two had remained good friends, and now eleven years later they were closer than ever.
With her loss still so fresh, Rylla had told Naomi about her family not long after they met but they had never talked about it since. Just because she didn't talk about it didn't mean that she didn't think about it. And she did. Every single day. Several times a day. Remembering her family was what kept them alive.
“I'm sorry, I shouldn’t have said anything.”
“No, Naomi, it’s fine. Really,” she assured her. If anyone understood loss it was Naomi. Rylla reached into her bag and pulled out her wallet, she retrieved her favorite photo and handed it over. “This is Josh and Elianna about a week before the accident.”
“Oh, Rylla, she’s so pretty,” Naomi gushed as she looked at the photo. “And she's so tiny. She was four months old, right?”
“Yes.” She had only had her beautiful sweet little daughter for four months before she was cruelly snatched away.
“You were so young when you had her.”
“I was nineteen.”
“I could not imagine having a baby at only nineteen. I'm terrified enough to be becoming a mother at thirty-one,” Naomi said.
“Josh made things a whole lot less scary. He was always so calm about everything, nothing fazed him, he was so great when I was stressed out about Elianna crying, or midnight feeds, or when she got sick, he always knew how to handle it. He was such an amazing dad. He was so good with her, every time he picked her up, she just lit up, she was such a daddy’s girl.”
“She might have been a daddy’s girl, but she looks just like you. The frizzy red hair, the big green eyes, the attitude, it’s all you.”
“Elianna was my mini me,” she agreed. “Josh and I used to joke about it all the time. He was already dreading her teenage years.” She couldn’t stop the tears from trickling out. Some days it was still hard to believe that her husband and daughter were gone.
“I'm so sorry.” Naomi wrapped her arms around her.
Rylla hugged her back. “Some days I wish I had been in the car with them,” she admitted.
“I'm glad you weren’t.” Naomi squeezed tighter. “And so are a lot of other people.”
She tried to move on, to keep living her life, to find happiness again because she knew that was what Josh would have wanted, but it was so hard. In the eleven years since her husband’s death, there had been only a couple of guys who had caught her attention, and none enough to encourage her to make another lifelong commitment. She’d thought she had her whole life ahead of her. An adoring husband, a gorgeous child, there was so much to look forward to, so much she thought she would enjoy.
In the end, all she’d had was two coffins and a home she couldn’t walk into because it was too full of memories.
Choosing a coffin for her tiny baby girl had been one of the hardest things she had ever done. It was so small. Seeing the tiny white box beside her husband’s coffin had broken her. All her hopes and dreams gone in an instant. Part of her died right along with Josh and Elianna, but the other part of her knew she had to honor them by living. So, she had joined the police force, made friends, dated occasionally, and did what she could to live her life.
Rylla rested a hand on Naomi’s stomach.
She had loved being pregnant. She had loved knowing that her baby was living inside of her. And she had loved every second of labor, no matter how much it had hurt because she knew that she was bringing her child into the world.
She felt a small kick and couldn’t help but smile.
“I can't wait to meet your baby, Naomi. I want to hold her, and kiss her, and cuddle her, and sing to her, and love her to pieces. I'm going to spoil her so much. I don’t want you to ever feel like you can't be thrilled about your daughter around me. I loved Elianna. Istilllove her, but I love you too, and I will love your little girl.”
“She’s going to love you so much, Rylla. She’s really lucky to have you in her life.”
“She’s really lucky to have you as a mom,” Rylla told her friend. She knew Naomi had a lot of self-doubts, but if she had been in the car that day and not Elianna, and her daughter had survived, she couldn’t think of someone she would rather have raising her than Naomi.
“I second that.”
They both turned to see Sam watching them. “Dinner’s ready.”
“Let’s eat,” Naomi said. “I'm starving.”