Forgiveness, Trust & Forever

Emily

Morning looked wrong in the nursery.
Not bad.
Just wrong.
Too soft for everything that had happened.
Pale Winchester light slipped through the gap in the curtains and landed across the green walls, the clean cot sheet, the little clouds and stars circling lazily above Eleanora's head.
She was asleep.
Actually asleep.
In the cot I had bought for her before I knew how much I would fear the shape of her.
Her cheek was turned to one side, rabbit tucked beside her, one tiny hand open against the sheet like she had surrendered to the room before I could.
I stood gripping the rail.
Hero stood beside me, close enough that his shoulder brushed mine every time either of us breathed too deeply.
He was trying not to make a thing of it.
I could feel the effort coming off him.
It was infuriating.
And kind.
Which was worse.
"She looks tiny," I whispered.
"She is tiny."
"She didn't feel tiny when she was screaming into my ear."
"She has range."
My mouth twitched.
I hated him a little for making me almost smile when my whole body felt wrung out.
The mobile had stopped playing. Its last note seemed to stay in the air anyway, tangled up with Brandon's name, Boo's tiny kicks beneath my ribs, and the memory of me standing in a shop in Southampton holding a box I did not need and buying it because, for one reckless afternoon, I had let myself want something.
Not motherhood.
Not properly.
Just a song over a cot.
That had felt safer.
My fingers tightened around the rail.
Hero noticed.
Of course he did.
"You okay?"
"No."
He nodded.
No fixing.
No speech.
Just the nod.
I looked at him from the corner of my eye.
His face looked worse in daylight. The bruise along his jaw had deepened to purple. His split lip was swollen. There was a faint scrape near his cheekbone, and the skin under one eye looked shadowed and tired.
Hayden had done that.
Hayden had come into my garage, touched my things, put petrol near my car, attacked Hero, and then walked up towards my daughter like he had any right to be there.
My stomach hardened.
"Stop looking guilty," Hero said quietly.
I blinked. "I'm not."
"You are."
"I'm looking angry."
"You're doing both."
"That's my face."
"That is not your face."
"You don't know my face."
He turned his head slightly.
Even bruised, exhausted, and half-broken, he gave me the kind of look that made my spine go stiff.
"I know your face."
Heat moved up my neck.
"Don't."
"I didn't say anything."
"You said it with your eyes."
"My eyes are injured."
"Your eyes are manipulative."
His mouth twitched.
Then he winced.
I sighed.
"You're impossible."
"You've mentioned."
"And you need a doctor."
"I need coffee."
"You need a doctor."
"I'll compromise with coffee."
I turned fully then, keeping my voice low so I wouldn't wake Eleanora.
"Hero, you were punched repeatedly in my garage by my ex-boyfriend while petrol was on the floor. You have bruised ribs at best and you're bleeding every time you smile like an idiot. You need medical advice."
"I'm fine."
"You are not allowed that sentence anymore."
He leaned his hip carefully against the cot, immediately regretted it, and tried to hide the pain.
Badly.
I stared at him.
He sighed. "Okay. I am not fine."
The admission landed harder than it should have.
"Thank you."
"But with lockdown-"
"There are phones."
"I don't want to take emergency time from people who need it."
"And I don't want to explain to your mother why you collapsed because you were too noble to call 111."
That made him pause.
Good.
Hero's mother remained the one authority neither of us was fully stupid enough to challenge.
He looked towards Eleanora.
"She's asleep."
"Yes."
"And you haven't slept."
"Neither have you."
"I can call from the living room."
"I'll make coffee."
His gaze moved back to me.
"Kitchen isn't downstairs," he said.
I narrowed my eyes. "I know where my kitchen is."
"I'm just checking. After the night we've had, geography feels fragile."
The laugh escaped before I could stop it.
Too loud.
Both of us froze.
Eleanora stirred.
Her mouth trembled.
The room held its breath.
Then she settled.
I exhaled slowly.
Hero looked at me with that soft, stupid proud face again.
I pointed at him.
"Don't."
He pressed his lips together.
"Go call someone," I whispered.
He nodded and moved carefully out of the nursery.
I stayed for a second longer.
Just me and Eleanora.
The room didn't swallow me.
That was new.
I reached up and touched one of the tiny felt clouds hanging from the mobile. It shifted gently beneath my finger.
"You like it," I whispered to her.
She slept on.
"You would. It was expensive."
Nothing.
I smiled faintly.
Then the smile faded.
"I bought it when I thought maybe I could be better than I was."
The words came out before I could stop them.
Eleanora didn't hear.
Or didn't care.
One-year-olds were generous like that.
I swallowed.
"I'm still not sure."
Her hand twitched against the sheet.
My throat tightened.
"But you're in it now," I whispered. "So I suppose that means I have to try."
Down the hall, I heard Hero's low voice from the living room.
Giving his name.
His date of birth.
Explaining an assault.
Admitting pain in his ribs.
Good.
I left the nursery quietly and went to the kitchen at the other end of the flat.
The place looked exactly like it should not have.
Normal.
Mugs in the cupboard. Formula tin near the kettle. A bottle drying on a clean muslin. My phone face down on the worktop like a dead thing. Hero's phone beside it, cracked slightly at the corner from last night.
The television was still on mute in the living room, showing closed high streets, empty pavements, government warnings, red banners crawling across the bottom of the screen.
Stay at home.
Protect lives.
I stared at the words while the kettle boiled.
Stay at home.
Which home?
The one above Clara-Bellas with a nursery I had kept locked?
The one Hero had been building with Eleanora without me?
The one I had imagined once, stupidly, with him?
Behind me, my phone buzzed.
I jumped so hard the spoon clattered into the sink.
For a second, I could not move.
Then I turned.
Unknown number.
Again.
My skin went cold.
I picked it up because apparently I had learned nothing.
No message this time.
A photograph.
My breath stopped.
It was not Ava.
Not Jo.
Not Hayden.
It was Hero.
Younger.
Leaner.
Standing outside the hospital.
The same hospital where I had given birth to Eleanora.
Only this photo was from before.
Years before.
Hero stood with his hands in his hair, head bowed, devastation written through his whole body.
Beside him was Ava.
Pale. Crying. Wrapped in a coat.
No baby.
No proof.
Just them.
A moment I had never seen.
A moment that had existed without me.
A caption followed.
He looked like that for her too.
My fingers tightened around the phone.
I should have felt jealous.
Maybe part of me did.
A small, sharp thing, old and bitter, scratching at the inside of my ribs.
But mostly I felt sick.
Because Ava had saved a photograph of grief.
Or staged one.
Or both.
Because she had waited years to use it.
Because there was something obscene about turning someone's worst hour into a weapon and sending it to a woman standing in a kitchen with baby formula cooling beside her.
Hero's voice came from the living room.
"Yes. Breathing hurts on the left side. No, I haven't lost consciousness."
I looked at the photo again.
He looked nineteen.
Lost.
Guilty.
I hated him.
I loved him.
I hated that I could see the boy he had been and still remember the man who had taken me to court.
Another message arrived.
Ask him if he cried this much when you left your daughter.
My thumb hovered over the screen.
Block.
Send to Jen.
Do not feed Ava.
We had said that.
We had agreed.
So why was my hand shaking like she had reached through the phone and touched my throat?
Because she knew exactly where to press.
A mother who lost.
A mother who left.
A father who grieved both.
I forwarded the photograph and message to Jen.
Then I blocked the number.
Then I put the phone down.
Then I gripped the edge of the counter and bent forward until my forehead nearly touched the cupboard.
Breathe.
Just breathe.
The kettle clicked off.
In the living room, Hero went quiet.
I straightened too fast.
He appeared in the kitchen doorway a second later, phone still in his hand, eyes already searching my face.
"What happened?"
"Nothing."
"Emily."
"I forwarded it to Jen and blocked it."
His face changed.
"What was it?"
"Something designed to make me ask you questions while you're talking to a nurse about whether your ribs are cracked."
"What was it?" he repeated.
I wanted to lie.
Not to protect him.
To protect myself from the answer he might give.
Instead, I handed him the phone.
He looked at the screen.
The colour drained from his face.
I watched him become nineteen again for half a second.
Not literally.
Worse.
Internally.
His shoulders folded around a memory, and the grown man in my kitchen disappeared behind the boy who had once stood outside a hospital with Ava crying beside him.
"So it was real," I said.
My voice sounded too flat.
Hero looked up.
"I don't know."
"There's a photo."
"That photo was taken the day she told me."
My stomach turned.
"At the hospital?"
He nodded.
"She called me. Said she needed me there. I went. She was outside when I arrived. She said she had lost the baby."
"Did you go inside with her?"
"No."
"Why?"
"She said she'd already been seen. She said she couldn't go back in. She just wanted to leave."
I stared at him.
"And you didn't question it?"
"I was nineteen, Emily. She was crying outside a hospital telling me she had miscarried a baby I didn't know existed. I wasn't exactly cross-examining her."
That stung.
Fairly.
I looked away.
"Sorry."
He exhaled, rubbing a hand over his face, then wincing when it pulled at his bruised jaw.
"No. Don't apologise. I've asked myself worse."
Silence filled the kitchen.
The kettle clicked softly as it cooled.
The formula tin sat between us.
Evidence of a living child.
"I don't want to care about this," I said.
Hero's eyes lifted.
"I mean it." My voice cracked. "I don't want to care about Ava or whether she was pregnant or whether you cried or whether she had part of you first or differently or whatever sick little story she's trying to write. I don't want to care."
"But you do."
"Yes." I hated the admission. "And I hate that more."
He leaned against the doorway carefully, one arm wrapped around his ribs.
"I didn't love her."
"That's not the only thing that hurts."
"I know."
"Do you?"
"Yes."
"No. You know betrayal. You know guilt. You know being caught." My voice shook. "But do you know what it feels like to stand here with your daughter asleep in the next room and realise another woman has been carrying around a dead-baby story with your name attached to it for years?"
Hero went still.
The words were awful.
Too brutal.
But I couldn't pull them back.
"I'm sorry," I whispered, immediately horrified. "That was-"
"True."
"No."
"Yes." His face was pale. "That's exactly what this is."
I looked down.
My eyes burned.
"I don't know where to put it."
"I know."
"I don't want it near Eleanora."
"Neither do I."
"I don't want Ava's grief, real or fake, in the same room as my daughter."
"Our daughter," he said softly.
I looked up fast.
Not angry.
Startled.
He seemed to realise how it sounded.
But he didn't take it back.
Our daughter.
Not correction.
Reminder.
Anchor.
I breathed out shakily.
"Our daughter," I repeated.
His face changed.
Just slightly.
Enough.
The baby monitor crackled from the counter.
Both of us turned.
Eleanora was still asleep, mouth open, one hand beside her rabbit.
Safe.
Still.
Alive.
For a moment, both of us simply looked at the small screen.
Then Hero's phone made a tinny sound against his palm.
He looked down.
"Nurse wants me to go to urgent treatment if the pain gets worse or I get short of breath. For now, rest, painkillers, ice, don't sleep flat, call back if anything changes."
"You should go."
"We can't leave."
"I know."
"The press are outside."
"I know."
"Eleanora just got settled."
"I know."
He watched me.
"You're scared."
"Yes."
"Of being alone with her?"
My answer came too quickly.
"No."
Then, because lying felt suddenly exhausting, I said, "Yes. But not like before."
He waited.
I looked at the monitor.
"I'm scared she'll cry and I'll resent her."
Hero's eyes softened.
"I resent everyone when they cry at four in the morning."
"That's not funny."
"It wasn't entirely a joke."
I looked at him.
He moved carefully to the kitchen table and sat down, breathing through the pain before speaking again.
"There are moments," he said quietly, "when I'm exhausted and she won't stop and I think, please, just stop. Just for five minutes. And then I feel like the worst father in the world."
I stared at him.
He shrugged faintly.
"Parenthood isn't constant holiness, Emily. Sometimes it's love with a headache."
Something inside me loosened.
Just a little.
"You never said that."
"You never asked."
The words could have been cruel.
They weren't.
They were sad.
I sat opposite him.
The kitchen table was small. Too small for everything between us. Knees almost touching. Phones on the counter. Coffee forgotten. Formula cooling. A locked-down morning pressing against the curtains.
"Did you resent me?" I asked.
His gaze lifted.
"When?"
"When you had her alone."
He was quiet.
Too quiet.
"Hero."
"Yes," he said.
The answer hurt.
But not as much as a lie would have.
"Sometimes."
I nodded.
He leaned forward carefully.
"When she was tiny and wouldn't sleep, and Mum would take her for an hour, and I'd sit there with bottles everywhere, smelling like milk and panic, I resented you." His voice cracked. "Because you were the only other person who should have understood how much I loved her and how much I wanted to scream."
My eyes filled.
"I'm sorry."
"I know."
"I mean it."
"I know."
The words landed differently this time.
Not dismissal.
Acceptance.
He looked towards the hall.
"But then she'd make this little noise, like a sigh, and I'd think... she's here. Whatever else happened, she's here. And then I'd feel guilty for resenting you because you weren't."
I wiped my cheek quickly.
"I was horrible."
"You were ill."
"I was horrible too."
He didn't argue.
Thank God.
I needed room for both truths.
The monitor crackled again.
Eleanora shifted.
Both of us watched.
She settled.
The silence returned.
Then Hero looked at my phone on the counter.
"We need to stop Ava reaching you."
"I blocked the number."
"She'll use another."
"Probably."
"I'll ask Jen about changing your number."
"No."
His brows drew together.
"No?"
"I'm not changing my number because Ava has decided to haunt us."
"Emily-"
"No. She's not pushing me out of my own life one contact detail at a time."
"She can keep hurting you."
"She already knows how."
His jaw tightened.
I softened a little.
Not for Ava.
For him.
"I'll mute unknown numbers. Screenshots to Jen. Police if she threatens. But I'm not disappearing."
Hero looked at me for a long moment.
Then nodded.
"Okay."
I narrowed my eyes.
"Was that real okay or 'I'm going to call Jen behind your back' okay?"
His mouth twitched.
"Real."
"Good."
"Mostly."
"Hero."
"I'll behave."
"Unlikely."
He smiled, then winced.
I stood.
"You need painkillers."
"I can get them."
"You can sit there looking tragic while I get them."
"That seems fair."
I got the packet from the bathroom cabinet and a glass of water. When I came back, he was looking at the monitor again.
His expression was impossible to read.
"What?" I asked.
"She looks like Brandon when she sleeps."
I stopped.
The pain was sudden.
Clean.
Beautiful and terrible.
"She does?"
"A little." He nodded towards the screen. "That serious mouth."
A laugh caught in my throat.
"Brandon did sleep like he was judging everyone."
"He judged in his sleep and awake."
"He'd judge us now."
"Harshly."
"Deservedly."
Hero took the painkillers from me.
Our fingers brushed.
Neither of us moved for a second.
Then the monitor crackled again.
This time, Eleanora's eyes opened.
She stared up at the mobile.
Not crying.
Just awake.
Watching.
Hero and I both leaned towards the screen like idiots.
"She's awake," I whispered.
"She's not crying."
"Is that normal?"
"Yes."
"How long will it last?"
"No idea."
We waited.
Eleanora blinked at the clouds and stars.
One little hand lifted clumsily towards them, fingers opening and closing at empty air.
My heart did something strange.
"She likes it," I said.
Hero's voice went soft.
"She does."
The baby made a tiny sound.
Not a word.
Just a sleepy little coo that barely survived the monitor speaker.
I stood before I knew I was doing it.
Hero looked up.
"You going in?"
I froze.
Was I?
The old instinct said no. Wait. Let him. Don't make promises with your body you can't keep with your life.
But my feet had already turned towards the hall.
"Yes," I said.
Hero didn't move.
Good.
I walked down the short hallway to the nursery.
Eleanora turned her head when I entered.
For one terrifying second, she looked at me.
Really looked.
Not through me.
Not past me towards Hero.
At me.
Her eyes were huge.
Hero's eyes.
My seriousness.
Brandon's sleeping judgement, apparently.
I approached the cot slowly.
"Hi," I whispered.
She blinked.
Then lifted her hand again, not towards the mobile this time.
Towards me.
My breath caught.
It was probably random.
A reflex.
A one-year-old reaching for anything that moved.
It did not matter.
I placed my finger in her palm.
She gripped it.
Firm.
Warm.
Alive.
My knees nearly gave.
"Hi, Boo," I whispered.
The word slipped out before I could stop it.
Not Nora.
Not Eleanora.
Boo.
The name from before.
The name from when she was only mine because nobody else could see her yet.
Her little hand squeezed my finger.
Behind me, I heard Hero stop in the doorway.
I didn't turn.
I couldn't.
Because if I looked at him and saw his face, I would break.
So I stayed bent over the cot, holding my daughter's hand while morning filled the nursery.
"Hi," I said again, voice shaking. "I'm here."
Eleanora cooed.
Tiny.
Sleepy.
Nothing like a word.
Still, it sounded like an answer.
I closed my eyes.
For the first time, Boo was not a memory.
She was here.