The Day Two Sisters Burned for Husbands Who Never Came novel · Chapter 18 of 24

Chapter 18: Full Sentences

Imogen looked at the baby in Dalton's arms, and her face did something I had never seen it do.

For one second there was nothing on it at all.

Then the warmth came back all at once.

"Oh, Dal," she said. "He's beautiful. Look at his hair."

"Imogen," said Dalton. "You can't be here."

"I've had the worst night." She let the balloon go, and it drifted up and bumped the ceiling. "I can't stop shaking. I can't get a full breath."

Her hand went to her throat.

She stepped toward the couch with her other hand out, reaching for his.

Dalton looked at the hand.

Then he looked down at his own two arms, which held my son.

"My hands are full," he said.

She stopped.

I had never once heard anyone tell her no, and it was a quiet, ordinary sentence about his arms.

"Dal. Please. I think I'm going to faint."

She slid down the doorframe and sat on the carpet with her cardigan pooled around her.

Her chest was heaving.

A nurse came down the hall at a walk and crouched beside her.

"Ma'am? Can you hear me? Look at me."

"I can't breathe," Imogen said, to Dalton, over the nurse's shoulder.

The nurse clipped a small gray sensor onto her finger and read the little screen.

She read it again.

"You're at ninety-nine percent," she said. "Your heart rate is seventy-two. You're breathing fine, honey."

"I'm not."

"You're talking in full sentences."

Somebody laughed behind me, low and ugly.

It was Corey.

He and Bree had come out of the NICU with the baby's wire still printed red on his chest, and he stood in the hall looking down at the woman on the floor.

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