Flowers//Elavan

~25~

The world came to a halt as Liz stood up from her squatted position slowly. Her eyes were tough and stared daggers into Avan, yet there was a glint of desperation in them as well. She was clutching onto what was in her hand for dear life, almost like if she let it go, all the knowledge and understanding she so desperately wants will slip away through her fingers. Her heart was beating a thousand miles a minute as Avan did nothing but stand there, rocking on his feet.

Avan didn't know what to do or say. There was an eerie silence between them that made him so uncomfortable but he didn't want to break it. He was too scared of what would come next.

"Who the hell is Rafa, Avan?" she demands in a low, dangerous voice that made his knees shake.

"Honey, I can explain-"

"Then, please do!" she bursts out a desperate plead. "Explain everything, Avan, because I'm so sick and tired of being kept in the dark!"

"Liz, love, I-I need you to show me what you found first, okay? Please?" he takes a shaky step closer to his wife, holding his breath.

Avan felt like he was walking on thin ice, like if he even dared to breathe wrong, someone would slit his throat right down the middle.

Liz sticks out her hand that held the small rectangular piece of paper. Her eyes stung with unshed tears of confusion.

"Do you know what this is, love?"

She nods silently as she takes a peak at the black and white blotches on the paper. There were small arrows that were pointing to different things and she couldn't really decipher what they were supposed to indicate.

"He was our son, wasn't he?" she whispered.

Was. It sounded so painful to hear her use the past tense.

"I-I don't know," he mumbles.

Liz loses all her strength and suddenly has to sit down at the edge of their bed. She didn't know how to feel and it was so tiring. In the past few months, she's experiences inner turmoil like never before and it drained her so much when she even began to try to understand how she was feeling.

"What do you mean you don't know, Avan?! There's a fucking sonogram right in your hand!"

At the mention of the sonogram, Avan loses what little hold he had on his emotions. He never thought the day would come when he had to relive the pain and the memories he had of that wretched time in his life. That period was already buried in his subconscious, never again to be brought up but here they were talking about it once more. The worst part was he had to repress all the pain because Liz, although perplexed to the greatest extent, did not know the pain he had to go through because she had forgotten.

"We were so excited," his voice cracks and he couldn't look her in the eye. "Hell, it was four years since we last had a baby in the house and you announced you were pregnant again. I was so fucking excited."

Liz was still so confused. She wanted him to continue but gave him time to collect himself once more.

"And-and we never told Mia, we never got the chance to. We were going to surprise her with these cute baby shoes and tell her she was gonna be a big sister. She was supposed to be the happiest girl in the world," he whimpers. "But you started spotting more than usual. You told me not to panic because it was a normal symptom of early pregnancy. We drove to the OB-GYNE clinic as soon as we could. You were coming up with names already and you were so fixated with the name Rafa because you were so sure it was gonna be a boy."

"What happened?" she softly speaks, afraid of what he was going to say next.

"They did the ultrasound and-and," his shoulders start to shake with silenced sobs as his lower lip gets sucked in between his teeth. "They said the pregnancy was ectopic."