Chapter 6 Let Me Go

Mia's POV

In the haze between consciousness and darkness, memories floated like scattered photographs, each one more painful than the last. The sedatives coursing through my veins turned my mind into a kaleidoscope of moments I'd tried so hard to forget.

"Mr. Branson will see you now."

The first time I saw Kyle in his office, tall and imposing behind that mahogany desk. I'd straightened my simple black dress, trying to look professional despite my racing heart. He hadn't recognized me from high school, of course. To him, I was just another candidate for the secretary position.

The scene shifted, blurred, reformed.

"The board needs me married. Someone quiet. Someone who won't cause problems." The contract sitting between us, stark black text on white paper. "I hope you don't have any other ideas."

And then our wedding day. No white dress, no flowers. Just a registry office and Linda as our witness. Kyle checking his phone throughout the ceremony. I'd worn a pale blue dress I'd saved three months to buy, hoping he might notice. He hadn't. "The ring is just for appearances," he'd said, sliding the platinum band onto my finger. "Don't read too much into it."

Then the dream turned cruel. I was standing in a sunlit room I'd never seen, and my stomach was round and full beneath my hands, and I was laughing — and two small voices were laughing somewhere just out of sight, in the next room, always in the next room, and I walked and walked through door after door trying to reach them, and every room was empty, and the laughter was getting fainter—

"No," I begged the dream. "Please. Let me see them. Just once, let me see their faces—"

The doors kept opening onto emptiness. And then even the laughter was gone, and there was only a white ceiling, and an antiseptic smell, and the steady beep of monitors.

I was awake. And I knew.

 My hands moved to my stomach and found it flat .

"Mia?" Scarlett was rising from the chair beside my bed, red hair wild, eyes swollen from crying. "Oh, thank God. You've been out for hours—"

"The babies," I said. My voice came out as a stranger's, rusted and small. "Scar. My babies."

Her face crumpled.

"I'm so sorry, Mia," she whispered, tears spilling down her cheeks. "The doctors — they tried everything, but..."

The room went very far away. I heard myself make a sound, and Scarlett climbed half onto the bed and held me while it tore its way out — all of it, ten years of it, grief upon grief upon grief, and at the bottom of everything, my two small lights, whose faces I would never see. I had promised them. I had covered them with my hand and promised: you are wanted, you are so wanted —

"I never got to tell them," I sobbed into Scarlett's shoulder. "That I quit. That I got the job. I was going to draw again — I was going to show them the ocean—"

"I know," she whispered, rocking me. "I know, honey. I know."

I cried until the sedatives dragged me back under, and this time, mercifully, there were no dreams.

When I woke again it was dusk, and Scarlett had gone for coffee, and the door stood half open onto the corridor. Two nurses paused outside it, their voices low, the way people talk past rooms they think are sleeping.

"—no, the other one. Miss Porter, third floor. Discharged this morning. Nothing but a bruised wrist, if you ask me."

"A bruised wrist? Mr. Branson called in three specialists. Dr. Osei flew in from Geneva. For a wrist."

"I heard he stayed by her bed the whole night. Wouldn't leave. They had to bring a cot in." A pause; the squeak of a trolley wheel. "Devoted, isn't he."

"Shh. Rich people," the other said, with a soft, disapproving click of the tongue, and the footsteps moved on down the corridor.

I lay looking at the ceiling. Three specialists. Geneva. A cot by her bed.  He was capable of it. The vigils, the flown-in doctors, the not-leaving. All of it. It just had simply never, not once in ten years, been for me.

He came the next afternoon.

Kyle was standing in the doorway, still in yesterday's suit, shadows under his eyes. He looked at the monitors.

"The doctors say you'll recover fully," he said finally.

Recover. As if what I'd lost was a thing that grew back. I said nothing.

My phone buzzed on the bedside table.

I picked it up. One new email, sitting at the top of the screen like a door standing open. Harrison & Lowe — Your divorce agreement is attached. Please review and sign at your convenience. Five days, the lawyer had said. He was right on time. I opened the attachment and read the first line — Dissolution of marriage between Kyle Branson and Mia Williams — clean, clinical, cold.

For once, the coldness of a contract felt like mercy.

"What is that?" Kyle asked.

I turned the screen toward him and watched his face go white.

"Sign the papers." I said. My voice didn't shake. It had done all its shaking; there was nothing left in it but the truth. "Let me go."

It was time to let them all go.