the time, and she was in constant, constant pain.” Rebecca closed her eyes against the memory. “All through it, she kept telling me that a miracle would save her. The priest came and blessed her with holy water, and she bought stuff online—special teas and oils and salves that were supposedly infused with some kind of magical healing powers but were really just a bunch of junk. She prayed all the time for salvation, and she held out hope until the very last day that God was going to save her.” Rebecca’s face was wet with tears, and Cait fought the urge to reach out and wipe them away. “She died thinking that she’d been abandoned by her God. She didn’t find peace. She fought it the whole way down, and when it finally claimed her, you know what she thought?”
“What?” Cait whispered.
“She thought it was her own fault. That if she’d just prayed a little harder, or believed a little bit more, that she would have been saved.” Rebecca shook her head. “Of course, nothing could save her. She died just shy of her forty-fifth birthday.”
“That’s awful. I’m so sorry.” Cait was silent for a minute. “I’ve never believed in miracles.”
“Neither do I.” Rebecca stared at her reflection in the window. “The baby’s sick,” she said finally. “She has a condition that means she won’t survive, at least not for more than a few days, and those days that she could live . . .” She closed her eyes. “It wouldn’t be any kind of life I’d wish for her. That’s why I’m doing this.”
Cait’s face crumpled. “Oh, God. I’m—I’m so sorry.”
Rebecca smiled sadly. “Me, too.”
She could see Cait working to piece things together. “So your husband doesn’t know that the baby is sick?”
“He knows.” Rebecca shook her head. “He’s a great believer in miracles, my husband, and he believes our baby will be a miracle.”
“And you don’t?”
She shook her head again. “I know better.”
Eleven Days Earlier
Patrick knelt next to the bed and wrapped his arms around Rebecca. “Baby, please. You just have to have faith.”
Three doctors’ visits in three days, and all of them said the same thing: there was no hope for their baby. She would die, either before she was born or during childbirth. If she did manage to survive the birth—which would be a “miracle,” one doctor said, though Rebecca wished he hadn’t used that word—the baby’s life would be short. A few hours, maybe a day. And then she would be taken from them.
“There was a child,” Patrick was saying now, “in France. I read about him online. He had the same condition, and he lived until he was three years old.” He squeezed her hands. “We could have three years, Becs. Maybe more.”
She had read that same article and countless others. Women who had carried their babies to term, tugged down on their foreheads the little woolen hats they’d knitted, kissed them and held them until they died. She couldn’t do this. She knew that it would break her, even more than she was already broken. She knew that she would never recover.
“I can’t do it,” she said, and Patrick sank his head into his hands.
So maybe she was a coward.
No, that wasn’t it. Or wasn’t all of it. She knew that this loss would break her either way, that she would never be able to gather together the splintered pieces of her heart and make them whole again. As soon as her doctor had said those words—“I’m sorry”—she’d known that she was being banished to a shadow world.
If she believed that her child would be able to experience even a moment of happiness on this earth, she would give it to her. Her baby wouldn’t be able to hear her, or see her, even feel her touch. She would be born into a cold, blank world, kept apart from her love, and then she would die.
At least for now, she could keep her baby safe and warm. And at least for now, she could decide the kind of death she wanted for her baby. One that kept her warm and safe inside of her up until the last possible moment.
Patrick believed in miracles, and he believed in his ability to conjure them into being. He had faith, her husband. In God. In fate. In himself. It was one of the things she loved about him.
But she had no use for faith right now, or God, or miracles. None of that mattered. None