Macie's Story

2

"Then what happened?" The girl asks eagerly, interrupting her father as he spoke his last sentence.

Jay looks up from Macie and glances at the door to the office they were expected to be called into at any moment. There was no movement on the other side, no sound, no indication of someone coming out, so he brought his eyes back to his daughter, who was looking up at him with a glimmer of hope that the rest of the story would be told.

She loved hearing stories; she always had. She liked picture books and fairytales, and her face would light up every time she sat down to hear one. But there was a certain way her features would change with excitement and anticipation when her parents told her real-life stories. Specifically, she loved hearing the ones from early in his and Hailey's relationship. She called it the real-life fairytale and her baby blue eyes would sparkle upon hearing another piece of her parents' puzzle. Jay couldn't wait for the day to be able to look down at his wife's carbon copy and tell her the story of how her mother was a superhero who saved his life more times than he can count - he could just picture the awe on her face already.

"Nothing big happened, not yet anyway. The middle part of the story is kinda boring, normal..."

xxx

(August 4th, 5 weeks)

Hailey struggled to stifle back another yawn as she stared down at the screen of her phone. She could feel herself slowly falling asleep but every time she got remotely close, something would startle her awake again, whether that be Jay accidentally dropping something in the bathroom or a tree branch being scraped against the glass by the wind.

In the back of her head, she was praying that tomorrow morning she would wake up and not feel so exhausted, but she knew that wasn't going to happen. This had been going on for days and Hailey still woke up as tired, maybe more so, as she was when she fell asleep. She was sure she was getting good sleep, enough sleep, yet the exhaustion was still lingering over her like a dark cloud.

She tried to pay no attention to it, but by last night it was all she could think about. She got it into her head that surely this wasn't normal, that barely being able to keep her eyes open during a quiet day at work or collapsing in bed the moment her head hit the pillow was not a normal thing to be happening. By this morning she was worried something might be wrong, but she was too nervous to look it up.

What if there was something wrong? After all that time last week feeling as though she wasn't ready for this, wasn't ready for the next step, Hailey couldn't fathom the idea of something going wrong now.

At some point she subconsciously put her hand on top of her stomach, as if she were shielding it. She had also been so stuck in her own head she didn't hear Jay come into the room.

He shoots her a small smile from the doorway, his eyes flicking between her and her hand. After a beat he sends her a look, telling her that he knows. He knows what she had been thinking, about what had been occupying her head the last twenty-four hours.

"You know it's okay, right?" He asks, stepping further into the room.

Hailey narrows her eyes. "Huh?" She mumbles, watching him as he rounds to his side of the bed.

Jay takes a seat beside her, leaning back against the headboard. "This, you being tired, it's completely normal according to the books."

"You read the books?" She questions, taken aback by that. Honestly, part of her knows not to be surprised he had, Jay had been more than supportive of it all since the moment she told him.

He nods. "I wanted to be prepared for whatever you chose to do."

"Jay, we're keeping the baby." She tells him quickly, slightly cutting him off.