She died. On the day of John Phillip Valois' birth, Mariposa Mionette Valois died. Several weeks pregnant with a child of her own, the child left this world and his mother followed willingly. Miscarriage caused a hemorrhage, and that night, Mary bled out. She hadn't been found until the next day. Everybody was too busy celebrating with the real mother and father to notice until it was just a few hours too late.
The new father had been the one to wind his wife's body. He had looked for her for a few minutes, finding it odd that her car was in the driveway and her cell phone booming bright in their matrimonial home. But then he noticed the bathroom door locked. He knocked upon it, telling her that he was home and would like to see her. The silence that followed caused his voice to ask if she was alright, and when that lead to silence once more, his shoulder was slammed into the door until it broke. And then he saw her.
He had screamed out at the sight of his wife's body covered in her own blood. He ran over and knelt down to her, barely batting an eye at the feeling of her blood upon his clothing. He checked her wrists, thinking that she had done something stupid, but found no cuts. His eyes trailed down her body, slowly lifting her blood soaked skirt to reveal the culprit. He checked her breathing and her pulse, but both were fruitless.
Their friends' joy had turned to sorrow when Francis called his brother, his voice trembling from tears and dry from his cries. He gasped aloud for air, dry wretching as he recounted the tale. Bash had turned a chalky grey as his brother had told him, refused Kenna's comfort as she asked him what wrong, simply driving to Francis' home to hold his brother as the somber paramedics.
He had cried tears of joy just a day before, but that joy was long dead when he sat with her in the room. Her skin was white, colourless and still, covered in a white gown and blanketed from head to toe in white lace. He had sat with her for hours, crying into her cold skin and begging forgiveness for all his wrongs, for not being with her and for the night Lola conceived John. He slept in that room with Mary's body, not that he'd slept, however. He wouldn't miss a second with her this time.
And the morning after, when they lay her in the ground, a tiny figure was wrapped in a white satin cloth. It was a boy. Or, would have been a boy. His father christened him James, before sending him to sleep forevermore with his mother. His own mother cried and clutched at him the day they lay Mary and James to rest, but Francis had became so numb that he didn't she'd a year, not even as they lay his wife and child in the ground. He had cried himself out, there was nothing left anymore.
But he had spoken one phrase in the burial. Just one.
"I'm sorry, my love."
