Page 17 of Broken Trust

“She was the best thing that ever happened to you,” she says. “You fix it, Dante. I don't care how long it takes.”

The door closes softly behind me, and I stand on the sidewalk holding a plate of burnt eggs, with nowhere to go, but an empty shell of a house.

12

DANTE

“Push, Mia. One more. Now.”

The midwife's voice cuts through the room, and Mia's growl comes low in her throat. My suocera is running the room, the way she runs everything. The Ice Queen. The woman who's never once doubted that her money gives her the right to tell the rest of us how to live. The more time I’ve spent with Mia and her, I’ve seen their similarities. They’re nothing like Gia. The wife whose heart I broke, and the reason I’m in here with her sister, still thinking about how this is so wrong in so many ways.

On paper, I’m her father, but then in a way I’m her uncle too, because I’m married to Gia.

This is all fucked up in so many ways.

What the fuck was I thinking going along with all of this?

“Breathe, tesoro. Like I showed you. Don't hold it in.” Then, to the midwife, not asking: “She needs more pillows. Look at her, look how she's slipping.”

They put me at the foot of the bed. Close enough to be useful. Far enough to be nobody.

Then I see the head.

I wasn't ready for it. Dark and slick and impossible, and the sight of it goes through me like a blade turned flat, and my stomach rolls hard enough that I have to look at the wall for a second and breathe through my nose. The reality that a person is coming out of a person, and me standing here having caused it in the worst way a man can.

“Again,” the midwife says. “She's right there. She's coming.”

My suocera has Mia's hand, and Mia bears down with a sound I'll hear for the rest of my life, and then my daughter arrives in a thin, furious, outraged cry.

It’s the most beautiful and disgusting scene. Between the blood, the umbilical cord is about to be cut. Mia calling out in relief. And my daughter is here. The midwife lifts her, red and roaring and streaked white, this tiny raging thing with her fists going, and I wait for Mia to reach for her. Mia doesn't move. She looks down at the baby laid against the crook of the midwife's arm, grey and wrung out against the pillows, and she doesn't lift her hands, and something in her face closes like a shop at night.

My suocera reaches out and scoops my baby cooing before the silence can turn into something anyone will have to name later.

“She looks like you,” I say to Mia.

“Maybe.” Mia turns her face to the window, to the black glass and the city smeared across it. “Or both of us.”

The door bangs open before anyone has thought to wipe the baby clean, and Nella comes in still wearing her navy scrubs, her lanyard swinging against her chest and her hair slipping out of its clip, breathing hard like she ran up four flights from her own ward. Somebody must have called down to tell her, or maybe the whole hospital has been whispering about the Rizzo girl in delivery room three since midnight. She takes in the room with one sweep, the way I imagine she reads a chart. My suocera is rocking the baby by the window, the midwife is peeling off her gloves, I'm pinned against the wall at the foot of the bed, and Mia is lying back against the pillows, still staring out at the city lights with her arms folded over her empty stomach.

Nella's eyes go to the baby first, and they soften for a heartbeat before they land on her sister and turn hard.

“Has she held her?” Nella asks the midwife quietly.

The midwife hesitates, glances at my suocera, and shakes her head.

Nella crosses to the bed, and when she speaks it's in the calm, professional voice she must use with frightened patients on her ward, which somehow makes it worse. “Mia, she needs skin to skin, and so do you. It helps with the bleeding, it helps your milk come in, and it helps her settle. Open your gown.”

“I'm tired, Nella,” Mia says without turning her head. “Mamma's got her.”

“Mamma isn't the one who just gave birth to her.”

“I carried her for over eight months. I've done my part.” Mia finally looks around, her face gray and damp and completely composed. “That was the arrangement, remember? I was the oven.”

Something jolts through Nella that I can see from across the room. It runs up her spine and locks her jaw, and when she speaks again the nurse is gone and there's only a sister left.

“Don't you dare hide behind Gia,” Nella says. “Gia would have crawled over broken glass for that baby. She'd have had her against her chest before the cord was cut, and she'd have cried all over her and never once let go. You're holding the one thing she'd give her life for, and you can't even be bothered to lift your arms.”

“Nella,” My suocera snaps from the window. “Not here.”