The Colonel Gave My Wedding to His Sick Sister novel · Chapter 21 of 24

Chapter 21: Her Aunt

The baby came at four in the morning, seven weeks early, and she screamed the whole delivery wing awake.

I heard it from the corridor, where I had been sitting for nine hours with a cold paper cup.

A nurse put her head out of the door.

"She's asking for her sister."

"I'm not her..."

"She's asking for her sister," the nurse said again, and held the door.

Livia lay on the bed, gray and soaked and shining.

In the clear plastic crib beside her, under a lamp, lay a very small person in a striped cap.

"Five pounds and one ounce," Livia whispered. "She's breathing on her own. They're keeping her for a week."

"She's perfect."

"Do you want to hold her?"

I looked at the crib and I did not move.

A cot behind a tent.

A bench, a gown, a white lace shawl pulled over the thing I could not see.

Then the baby opened her eyes, which were unfocused and dark and entirely uninvolved in anything her parents had done.

"She isn't his," I said, and heard how I sounded. "I mean, she isn't anyone's fault."

"No," Livia said. "She isn't."

The nurse lifted her out and laid her in my arms.

She weighed almost nothing.

Her fist closed on the edge of my sleeve.

I stood in the middle of the room and cried, which I had told myself I would not do.

"I want to say something," Livia said, from the bed. "And you don't have to say anything back."

"All right."

"I know what you're giving me. A bed and a roof, and the right to sit in the room. I know it isn't forgiveness."

"It isn't."

"I'm not going to ask you to be my sister again." Her chin trembled. "I'm going to ask you to be her aunt. Whatever you decide I'm owed, she isn't owed less."

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