He Called Me His Plaything in Front of His Men, So I Left Carrying His Heir novel · Chapter 24 of 24
Chapter 24: The Heir
Mateo Orozco Candela was born at ten past noon on the fourth of July, in a hospital on the Westside, with fireworks being tested somewhere over the river.
He weighed seven pounds two ounces and had a full head of black hair and a furious, outraged voice.
I had been in labor for nine hours.
I do not remember most of it.
I remember my mother on my left, with her rosary wound around her fist and her other hand clamped on mine.
I remember Cosima on the far side of the bed in her charcoal blazer, reading the numbers off the monitor in her weather voice, steady as a metronome.
"Eighty. Ninety-two. Down to seventy-eight, that's fine, that's the contraction easing."
At one point my mother said, "Cosima, hold my hand," and Cosima took it without a word.
I remember Aurelio at my shoulder.
He did not say much.
He held my head against his chest and wiped my face with a cold cloth.
Every time the pain came, he said my name.
"Ximena. I'm here. I'm here," he said.
At the end I told him I couldn't, and he told me I could.
I told him I hated him.
He said, "I know," and kissed my wet hair.
My mother laughed out loud in the middle of it.
Then the doctor said, "One more," and I did it.
There was a great wet rush and a silence.
Then the voice came, thin and angry and alive.
They laid him on my chest, wet and purple and slick, with a squashed red face and tiny clenched fists.
He had Aurelio's nose.
He had my mother's mouth.
I looked down at him and could not see through my tears.
"Hello," I said. "Hello, you."
Aurelio put one finger into the fist.
The baby gripped it hard.
I watched the big careful man bend over my chest with his beard against my hair, and I heard the sound that came out of him.
It was not a word.
It was not a sound I had heard from him in the cold room or the laundromat or the pilothouse or the Gardner farm.
It was a man weeping with his whole body, silently, over his son.
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–6 of He Called Me His Plaything in Front of His Men, So I Left Carrying His Heir are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
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