Page 69 of First Comes Love
I swallowed hard at the memories. How terrified I’d been every time I’d left my newborn baby in a plastic box. How I’d barely slept for fear they would call to let me know she hadn’t survived the night.
She had been so fragile. So unbelievably precious.
“I wish I’d have been there,” Xavier said in a low voice that shook slightly. “I wish I could have seen her.”
“Well, you can,” I said. “I just mean…I do have pictures.”
He looked up sharply. “Show me.”
“Do you really want to?” I asked, already pulling out my phone. “It’s not—I mean, I always thought she was beautiful. But it’s not really what people expect a newborn to look like. Sometimes it freaks them out.”
Xavier held out his hand wordlessly, brooking no argument.
I pulled up the series of pictures I looked at sometimes late at night, when I wanted to remind myself of how far my girl and I had really come. Sofia on the day she was born, hardly bigger than a hand’s width, tinged with blue, skin so delicate you could almost see it. Sofia wrapped in a gauzy cloth, but still on the ventilator, a bit pinker but with a thick tube spilling out of her mouth, helping her breathe the air she couldn’t quite take in by herself. And finally, Sofia on my chest, still with the tube, but skin to skin at last while my dark hair tumbled around us in a messy halo of new motherhood.
Xavier gazed at the last one the longest. “She’s so small. She looks like she could just be snuffed out. Like a candle.”
“She almost was.”
He glanced between the picture and me. “And you had to go through that alone.”
I shrugged and focused on reorganizing my chopsticks again and again. “I wasn’t really alone. I was still living at my grandmother’s house. Two other sisters with me, and my older ones just a few blocks away. When I was finally able to bring her home, it could have been worse.”
“Ces.”
I looked up. His eyes were large and full of some unnamable emotion.
“All right,” I admitted, trying not to cry and failing, as I did any time I remembered that horrible period. I swiped at a few tears as they emerged, determined not to have a complete scene in the middle of the restaurant. “I was alone. My family was around, and yes, they helped, and I’ll be forever grateful for it. But honestly, it’s just not the same when the baby isn’t—”
“Your own?” Xavier finished for me.
Our eyes met, and I couldn’t look away.
“Yes,” I whispered.
They loved her. Nonna, Mattie, my sisters. They all loved Sofia deeply in their own ways. But those days in the hospital and afterward, when I brought her home, they were more worried for me than for her. But I didn’t care at all what was happening to me. Right from the beginning, something inside me knew Sofia was mine. That my entire mission on this earth was to keep her safe. And from the beginning, I was so afraid I couldn’t.
Xavier looked back at the photos, scrolling through them a few more times.
“And now?” he asked. “Is she safe now?”
“Well, she’s with my grandmother and her aunts, so she’s pretty damn happy at the moment, yeah.”
“That’s not what I meant.” He pushed the phone back across the table and held my eyes. “I meant her home. With you.”
I didn’t like what he was insinuating. I straightened up in my chair so I could look at him eye to eye without blinking. Without cowering under that ice-blue gaze.
“For the last four years, I have done nothing but keep that girl safe and healthy,” I informed him. “I have given everything I could to provide her with the best life I can. She is safe in her home, Xavi. I can promise you that.”
I waited for him to break away first, but he didn’t. That penetrating blue gaze, so unearthly, seemed like it was trying to tease something else out of me.
Finally, he pulled out his wallet and set several hundred-dollar bills on the table. I didn’t have time to gape before he had pushed back in his chair and stood, then offered his hand to mine.
“Then show me that too,” he said. “Please.”