Page 7 — Emily
That night, I finally told Thomas something I had never fully explained.
“I keep thinking about Emily.”
He sat beside me.
“I know.”
“No. I mean the dreams.”
He looked at me.
“I don’t think I’ve told you everything.”
I described the dream again.
The hallway.
The baby.
Emily’s voice.
“You have to find him.”
Thomas listened quietly.
Then I told him something else.
Emily had always been healthy.
There had been no warning.
No obvious illness.
No reason for us to believe anything was wrong.
Then one day she complained about a headache.
We thought it was stress.
Then it got worse.
By the time we understood how serious it was, we were already fighting a battle we didn’t know how to win.
She died at fifteen.
That experience changed me forever.
After Emily’s death, I became terrified of silent illnesses.
I checked symptoms online.
I worried about every headache.
Every strange pain.
Every unusual feeling.
But somehow, this mass had been inside me without me knowing.
Thomas took my hand.
“You couldn’t have known.”
“I know.”
“You couldn’t have saved Emily.”
“I know.”
“But you can’t spend the rest of your life punishing yourself for things you couldn’t control.”
I looked at him.
“I just don’t want to leave you.”
He pulled me into his arms.
“You’re not going anywhere.”
For the first time, I realized that we weren’t only waiting for Liam.
We were fighting for the chance to raise him together.
