He Comforted Their Child While I Recovered Alone Chapter 01

He Comforted Their Child While I Recovered Alone Chapter 01

My sister ran me over with her car. I lost the baby. My own parents personally put her in prison for it.

Grayson held me and swore, “I will never forgive whoever killed our baby.”

I believed him. I thought they actually loved me.

Then Piper got released, and Mom begged me to come to her welcome-home dinner.

When I said no, she yelled at me for the first time in her life.

“You just lost a baby that was never even born, and you’ve got a bad leg. Piper spent five years in prison.”

“She hasn’t had a single ounce of family love in five years. Can you stop being so petty?”

Grayson tried to talk me into it too. “It’s time to let the past go.”

I stayed up all night thinking it over, and finally decided to forgive Piper.

The next day, I picked up a gift and drove to the restaurant.

But when I pushed open the door to the private room, I found a four-year-old boy sitting in Grayson’s lap, calling him Daddy and calling Piper Mommy.

On the screen behind them played a video of Grayson holding him as a newborn, my parents smiling as they clasped a silver baby bracelet around his tiny wrist.

And the boy’s name was the exact name we’d picked out for the baby I lost.

Piper had never spent a day in prison.

For five years, she’d been living overseas, raising her son with my husband.

And I’d spent those five years dragging a broken leg around an empty nursery, alone with the pain.

I didn’t go in.

I just had my lawyer draw up the divorce papers, and I booked a flight out of the country that same night.

If they were already their own family, then it was time for me to leave too.

……

Through the crack in the door, I watched Grayson sit at the head of the table with Beckett in his arms.

Piper was pressed against his side.

My parents sat on either side, busy unwrapping the kid’s presents.

The photographer lifted his camera and called out, cheerful. “Alright, all five of you, squeeze in close.”

When Piper leaned down toward the boy, Grayson slid his arm around her waist like it was nothing.

The five of them turned to the camera.

They moved like they’d taken a hundred family portraits just like this one before.

The second the shutter clicked, I caught my own reflection in the glass.

My face was bone-white. My left leg was bent at an angle it was never supposed to bend.

I was hiding in the dark, watching them glow under the lights, one happy reunited family.

Like some shame-ridden rat hiding in a sewer, peering up at a happiness that was never meant for me.

The lights in the private room dimmed.

A photo came up on the screen. It was Beckett, just hours old.

There was a date stamped under it.

I stared at those numbers, and my left leg started to throb.

That was the day of my third leg surgery.

The car crash had shattered my knee.

The first two surgeries hadn’t gone well.

Before the third one, the doctor told me if this one failed too, I might never walk on my own again.

A nurse held out the consent form and asked, “Is your family here?”

I called Grayson a dozen times.

Nobody picked up.

Mom said Piper had collapsed in prison, and she and Dad were rushing over there.

The surgery couldn’t wait any longer.

In the end, I signed my own name on the line for next of kin, my handwriting shaking across the page.

The nurse looked at me like she couldn’t stand it.

“You’re not scared, going through something this big alone?”

Of course I was scared.

Scared I’d never walk again.

Scared I’d wake up and there still wouldn’t be a single person there.

But I still made excuses for them. “My sister’s in trouble in prison. They didn’t mean to leave me alone.”

Except Piper had never been anywhere near a prison that day.

She’d been overseas, giving birth to Grayson’s son.

And every single person who claimed they couldn’t get away had been standing at her bedside.