Nikki Logan - Their Newborn Gift

‘It was nice there. But I was alone. Don’t leave me alone, Mummy…’

Lea dug her fingernail into her thumb hard to channel the pain, to focus the grief, not to think about the symbolism of Molly’s dream. It took everything she had not to let the tears well up and spill over in front of her anxious daughter. Time enough for that later.

‘Do you feel like waking up now?’ Lea’s voice was painfully tight. Molly rubbed dark, deep eyes and shook her head.

‘Okay. How ’bout I sit with you here until you go back to sleep and I’ll make sure you don’t go back to the place where you were alone—okay?’

‘’Kay.’ Molly sucked her thumb into her mouth and then rolled onto her side. Lea tucked her in more firmly and gently rubbed her back until she felt her daughter’s breathing regulate. Then it was safe to let the tears creep out. They streamed, un-checked, down her face accompanied by the silent sobs she’d become so adept at.

Minutes passed and Lea’s whole body hurt from keeping the pain inside. She sucked in deep, shuddering breaths then tiptoed out of Molly’s room and headed for her mobile. She punched in Reilly’s mobile-phone number and pecked out a concise text-message with badly shaking fingers.

Just three words: I’ll do it.

THE conception of their second child was a far cry from their first. Even Reilly appreciated the irony.

Three weeks of blood tests, injections, headaches and hormones, until Lea’s body artificially ripened to bursting point, followed by scans every three days until her eggs were perfect for harvesting. Then the city specialist who had been flown in accessed Reilly’s tiny, frozen sample and injected the healthi-est thaw survivor directly into one of Lea’s eggs.

Shame had been a near-permanent resident in Reilly’s throat, knowing there’d been barely any sperm left, the rest biologically massacred by his over-zealous immune system.

Now, Lea stared rigidly at the beige ceiling and did her best to ignore him and the six people in the room all fussing around the business end of her body where her legs were braced in stirrups and her hospital gown was tented over her bent knees. As if she needed the privacy from herself.

Reilly’s gut tightened and his temperature raised. He hadn’t realised how humiliating this would be for her when he’d insisted on being present for the implantation. Or that every muscle in her body would tremble uncontrollably. Empathy washed through him.

They’d tried to convince him it was nothing they hadn’t all seen before, but the excited buzz and the number of personnel present seemed to indicate an ICSI implantation was something several of them had very definitely not seen before in their remote hospital posting. He could see the bright lights, the graceless position, the room full of strangers, were all starting to get to her. Even with sedation slowly kicking in.

His lips tightened. Could they make this any more uncomfortable for her?

Molly might not have been conceived in love, but at least it had been natural, the joining of two people who had connected for a preciously short time. In a bed. With sweat. This man-made artifice was so foreign.

But entirely appropriate under the circumstances.

Lea sighed, just when he might have himself. He glanced back at her eyes and saw they were getting more glazed as the sedation continued to take effect.

‘Lift your hips slightly, Lea? Good girl, thank you,’ the specialist requested from down near her feet. She flinched at something being done down there. Three pairs of eyes glanced up at her over blue hospital-masks, then at the clock on the wall. Was she taking too long to relax?

‘Why are all the blue people talking so loudly?’

At least he thought that was what she said. Her speech reminded him of the lost tourist they had found out on the far corners of Minamurra one time, half-frozen after a night in dry, sub-zero Kimberley temperatures.

Lea started to fight the sedation and he took her hands to stop her waving them about. She forced her head towards him, as though he were a life buoy in a tossing sea, and stared at him with vulnerable, anxious eyes. A pang bit deep in his chest. ‘You’re okay, Lea.’

‘Reilly?’ Her frown doubled even as her hand-hold grew tighter.

He turned to the nearest doctor. ‘Should she be in this much distress?’

The doctor rested his hand on her calf kindly. ‘She’s not really responding to the sedation as we would have hoped.’

Lea Curran doing something completely contrary to the norm? No surprises there.

‘We’ve ceased the feed now. It’ll ease off shortly.’ The doctor’s attention went back under the sheet as yet another man in blue bustled in the door and dived under the screening covers at the foot of the bed.

‘Jeez, buy a girl a drink first,’ Lea said, over-loudly, then started to giggle. Not in a good way.

Reilly stood. ‘Okay—essential personnel, stay. Everyone else, out.’ He was counting on everyone in the room assuming he was the loving husband, that he had a right to issue orders on Lea’s behalf. Apparently they did. Half the room left with baleful glares, only the chief doctor and two nursing atten-dants staying. Both of them kept a respectful distance.

At last.

Lea didn’t look at him but he was sure he heard her voice thank him.

The tiny whisper made him inexplicably tight-chested. If he hadn’t bullied his way in here, she would have been doing this completely alone. Where the blazes were her sisters? Had she even told them this was happening? What kind of a crazy family did she come from, anyway? Just when he thought families didn’t come worse than his own.

He shook his head. Neither the Currans or the Martins could be stranger than the family he and Lea were in the midst of making—one child conceived by accident, a second through negotiation, despite him having vowed all his life never to rep-licate the mistakes of his past.

The child they were making today might grow up mother-less, but there were worse things. Like growing up with a mother who created a child for what it could give her, rather than to bring a life into the world for its own sake.

A mother like his own.

Lea mumbled incoherently and Reilly forced his gaze back to her. Motives aside, this woman had brought him the miracle of fatherhood, not once, but twice. Long after he’d given up all hope of ever experiencing it. For that, she deserved his toler-ance, if not his friendship. He might not like her values very much, but Lea Curran had unintentionally given him the biggest gift of his life. Two children.

The doctor caught his eye and nodded. Reilly leaned in close to Lea’s ear and tightened his hand on hers. ‘They’re going to start now. Are you ready?’

Her glazed eyes met his and she nodded, just before her lashes slipped down to rest on her cheeks.

‘Wake up, Lea, you’ll want to see this.’

He risked a gentle stroke on her flushed cheek, just below where her lashes lay like freshly cut grass. She curled her face into his fingers and he gently ran his knuckles across her perfect skin, memory surging back. God help him if she remembered this later. ‘Open your eyes, Lea. Look at our baby.’

The word ‘baby’ brought her focus hurtling back, as though she’d suddenly realised what was happening. That she was being implanted, right now, and that the last man in the world she would want watching was here, holding her hand.

He let his hand drop with the pretence of taking her chin and turning her face towards the large-screen monitor. Every eye in the room was fixed on that screen, and the blurry shapes on it suddenly started to make sense to both of them.

Lea’s eyes widened as far as his. ‘That’s my uterus.’