She Took My Husband on My Wedding Night, I Didn't Find Out Until We Gave Birth Together novel · Chapter 2 of 32

Chapter 2: The Song

With no one else to call, Clem calls the paramedic who kept her alive five years ago, and he finishes a song nobody in this world should know.

They moved me to a room at the end of the hall before ten.

One bed. One window. A view of the parking garage.

The nurse from that morning wheeled Margo's bassinet in herself and parked it where I could reach it.

"His name's off her visitor list," she said. "Your friend's too. The front desk has photos."

"Thank you."

I sat with my phone in my lap and scrolled my contacts.

Bradford. Bradford's assistant. Bradford's driver.

Gran.

Valerie, with a pink heart I'd typed next to her name at twenty.

The flour supplier. The bakery's landlord, which was also Bradford.

Six years in this city, and every number led back to one of them.

In Columbus, I'd have called my mother.

In Columbus, my mother was either missing a daughter or had never had one. I'd never found out which.

I turned the phone face down.

Margo woke up and shouted about it.

I fed her, badly, and we both cried a little.

Then she fell asleep with her fist jammed against her cheek.

My hospital bag sat on the chair.

Valerie had packed it for me two weeks ago. She'd put in the good socks.

I dug out my wallet just to give my hands a job.

Behind my old bar ID, folded in half, was a business card gone soft at the corners.

BOSTON FIRE DEPARTMENT. ENGINE 41. C. RAFFERTY, FIREFIGHTER/PARAMEDIC.

On the back, in blue pen: "In case you want to finish the song. C."

I'd carried it five years.

I'd never called it.

The man who wrote it had knelt in that alley with both hands pressed into my side while I bled through his gloves.

In the ambulance he'd hummed to keep me awake.

It was a song from home.

A song that was on every radio in Ohio the summer I turned eighteen, in a world this city had never heard of.

I was bleeding from fifteen holes, and I sang the next line back to him.

He stopped humming.

Then somebody put a mask on my face, and I never saw him again.

I dialed before I could talk myself out of it.

It rang four times.

"Rafferty."

His voice was deep and tired, Boston on top and something flatter underneath.

"You won't remember me," I said. "Five years ago. The alley behind the bar on Lansdowne. Fifteen stab wounds. I sang."

Silence.

Then, very quietly: "Clementine Mahon. Your chart number ends in four-four-seven."

I didn't know what to say to that.

"Where are you?" he asked.

I told him.

"I just got off a twenty-four," he said. "Give me forty minutes. Do you want anything?"

"I don't know what I want."

"Okay. I'll bring that."

He was there in thirty-five.

He filled the doorway in a navy fire department T-shirt and jeans, broad and tall, auburn hair cut close, a short red beard.

He was holding two plastic cups of chocolate pudding.

"They already have pudding here," I said.

"Not this pudding." He set one on my tray. "This is from the vending machine on the second floor. Different supplier. I've done research."

"How much research?"

"Five years of overnights in this building. I could write a paper."

He pulled the chair to the bed and sat on it backwards.

Then he looked at the bassinet, and everything about his face went soft.

"Who's this?"

"Margo. She was born at 4:12 this morning. She's furious about it."

"Can I?"

I nodded.

He washed his hands at the sink first, all the way to the elbows, with the practiced ease of long habit.

Then he lifted her the right way, one big hand under her head, and tucked her against his chest.

She opened one eye and glared at him.

"Yeah," he told her. "Me too. Mornings are terrible."

I laughed for the first time since breakfast. It hurt in places I didn't know I had.

"So," he said, still looking at Margo. "Where's the dad?"

I'd decided in the thirty-five minutes that I wasn't going to lie to anyone ever again.

"My husband put sleeping pills in my water on our wedding night," I said. "Then he slept with my best friend in the bed beside me. She had his son down the hall at 4:19. He told me about it this morning like it was the weather."

Cormac didn't move.

Something went still in his jaw.

"Your best friend," he said. "Valerie Vickery."

"You know her?"

"Everybody on Lansdowne knows Valerie." He shifted Margo higher. "I'm sorry. That's a stupid thing to say. I'm sorry anyway."

"It's not stupid."

Margo made a noise and he swayed without thinking about it, side to side.

I didn't decide to do it.

The melody just came out of me, low, the first line of that song from home.

I hummed it, a little flat on the high note.

Cormac stopped swaying.

He looked at me over Margo's head.

Then he sang the next line, soft, with all the words.

"Keep the light on, I'm almost there."

Nobody in this world knew those words.

Nobody.

My hands closed on the blanket.

Cormac laid Margo back in the bassinet very carefully.

Then he sat down, leaned his elbows on his knees and looked straight at me.

"Clementine," he said. "Did a cold voice offer you a ride home this morning too?"

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