Page 107 of Rebel Heart
My hand, that had been curled around my neck, dropped down around her back, seeking anything to ground me to reality, anything to make this better. Layla was by my side a minute later, and for a while, I just allowed myself to hold on to any scrap of comfort I could find.
I didn’t know how much time had passed, but I knew it had been a while when Layla suggested, “Why don’t we grab a seat, Beau?”
And as she and Ava urged me toward one of the chairs, I noticed that Cooper, Ivy, and Marco had all entered the room.
Layla sat on one side of me, stroking my back as Ava crouched in front of me. Liam’s voice filled the air a moment later. “Have you heard anything?”
It was an effort to lift my head and look at him. “No. Not a word.”
Liam looked haunted, and as my gaze slid through the room to Marco, Ivy, Tate, and finally, Cooper, I realized that the sum of devastation and terror written in their expressions might have accounted for a quarter of what I felt.
“What happened?” Tate asked, not a trace of the bitterness I’d grown accustomed to seeing on his face to be found.
Before I could respond, Wyatt, Malcolm, and Evelyncame bursting into the room. “Where is she? What happened?” Evelyn cried.
Malcolm was holding on to his wife, putting every effort into keeping her remaining upright as he guided her toward a chair.
“Does anybody know anything?” Malcolm asked.
All eyes landed on me.
They were all here. Except for Rhea and Skye, who I presumed stayed home to keep their children asleep and out of the hospital, this entire family showed up at barely four o’clock in the morning for Jules.
“I don’t know,” I confessed. “I just… She woke up in excruciating pain and knew something wasn’t right. Her belly was hard, and the pain was unbearable.” I shook my head, recalling the helplessness in those awful moments when I’d first woken up. “She walked around the room, shaking, telling me she couldn’t get away from the pain. It wouldn’t stop. Nothing she did eased it. And then she was bent over the toilet, vomiting and sweating. I lifted her in my arms and raced here. I haven’t seen her since they took her just before I called Liam.”
“Nobody told you what they think is going on?” Cooper asked.
With a slight shake of my head, I answered, “Nobody but Jules.”
“What did she say?” Ivy looked like she was going to be sick herself. It might have only been the hold Marco had on his wife that stopped her from collapsing.
I closed my eyes and remembered the fear in thosewords as she said them to me. “She thinks she was losing the baby.”
“Oh, God,” Ivy cried, burying her face in her husband’s chest.
I leaned forward, resting my elbows on my thighs and pressing the heels of my palms against my eyes.
Heavy.
Everything just felt heavy.
At some point, I sensed Ava had moved away, probably to stand with her husband. And Liam must have lowered himself to a chair beside Layla, because I no longer felt her hand resting on my back.
They all had someone.
They all had each other.
And the only one I had was somewhere in this hospital, and I didn’t have a clue what was happening to her.
Long, agonizing minutes passed when the most unexpected thing happened.
Malcolm Westwood placed his hand on my shoulder and squeezed before he sat down beside me. I suspected he was just trying to be a decent man in the situation, but he surprised me when he spoke.
“I can remember the day I was standing beside my wife’s hospital bed just over twenty-five years ago. May 22nd. That was the day Jules was born,” he began. I twisted my neck to look back at him, but he wasn’t looking at me. He was staring off into space, clearly recalling the day his daughter was born. “We knew then that she was going to be our last child. That welcoming her into the world completed this family. And I’ll neverforget just how different she was from her siblings from that very first day. Where the rest of them had been sleeping in their mother’s arms right after they’d been born, Jules wasn’t.”
He let out a soft chuckle, the only sound in the room as everyone waited to hear the rest of his story. “That little girl was wide awake and taking it all in.”
I smiled at the thought, feeling genuinely comforted by it.
