Second Time's the Charm

It made a frightening kind of sense.

Frightening because if you were trying to prevent further pain, you didn’t open yourself up to a level of caring that could cause it.

Sometimes people just couldn’t take on any more disappointment. Sometimes they just shut down. He’d seen it happen in detention more than once.

“This time I was right.” Lillie’s words weren’t a surprise. He’d known where this was leading.

“You lost the baby?”

A lot of women did, or so he’d read in the books he’d devoured after he’d first found out Kate was pregnant. And most of the women who miscarried tried again.

Lillie shook her head and looked up at Jon. He understood the resolution in her eyes. The acceptance of powerlessness.

Before Abraham, he’d seen the same look in the mirror every morning when he’d stood in front of it.

“She told us that the baby had a malformed heart.”

“Was it a boy or a girl?” he asked, but he already knew. She’d had a son. And she was transposing some of her feelings about the baby to Abraham.

Lillie grabbed her bare toes with both hands. He could see the whites of her knuckles. But her voice was even when she said, “A boy.”

“Did you carry him to term?”

“Yes.”

Had her son been stillborn? He couldn’t imagine the horror-filled months of carrying a baby inside of you, feeling it move and form, bonding with it as it grew, knowing it would not live.

Already grieving the sudden loss of her parents and the infidelity of her husband, she’d also had to endure the hell of growing a child that she knew was going to die.

“Was Kirk with you when you delivered?”

Her expression hardened until she didn’t even look like Lillie. “Kirk hadn’t been ‘with’ me since the day we got the diagnosis. He went back to his girlfriend. Got her pregnant, too. And moved in with her.”

Jon scrambled for words. For anything that could make this better.

There just wasn’t anything.

“While you were still pregnant?” he asked because, since they’d come this far, he needed to know, to understand the depths of her pain. Because they needed to get this all out now.

She nodded.

“What about hi

s parents?”

“They were at the hospital when Braydon was born.”

Braydon. Her tone softened when she said the word. Tears filled her eyes.

And Jon knew that he and Abraham had never really had her heart. Lillie had already given it away. To a little boy named Bray who hadn’t lived long enough to call her Mama.

* * *

LILLIE STAYED IN Jon’s bed for as long as it took her to gather her strength. When she was ready, he let her go without a word.

Just as she’d known he would. He wasn’t going to beg.

And she didn’t want him to.