“We can try again.”
Here have some DuPratt angst xoxo
They were both messes, and the nurses were turning a blind eye toward the too expensive nicotine gum Lili was eating her way through like it was candy since she’d been admitted and given the official word. And with how often she was leaning over to fetch another piece of gum from the pack that was now almost empty, Beau knew it wasn’t his fault he hadn’t realized she’d turned over and curled up to cry this time. But that didn’t make him feel less guilty for not realizing it immediately.
It was when he felt her start to shake that he realized her movement wasn’t just trying to find some semblance of comfort despite the distinct pain he had to assume she was in from the loss of the child that had been so close to viability. Close enough that she’d been in a maternity dress already when she’d felt the stabbing pain and someone else had noticed the trickle of blood that ran down her thigh in the middle of the board meeting she’d been running for the last hour.
How long had she stood there, unaware that she was miscarrying? How long had she been bleeding and assuming the cramping pains she felt were just indigestion, something the baby hadn’t liked from her lunch? Beau wanted to ask the doctors, to know how long his wife had been alone before she’d even found out the truth, to know how long ago they should have known she needed to be on bed rest and what the doctors had missed. He wanted to know what went wrong, so they could fix it.
But Lili was more important at the moment, and while she had played strong for the last few hours already, while her fathers were present and a couple of her brothers had called in to check on her, she certainly wasn’t as okay as she was playing. Beau had known that, of course, but the feeling of her starting to shake against him, obviously breaking down in tears that were certainly a long time coming already, just made that more obvious. And so, he pulled her in closer, wrapped his arms around her to rub her back as she curled in close to him and rested her head against his chest to hide the tears on her face.
“I don’t know that we should,” she finally offered in response to his attempt at comfort, after a good several minutes of silence. “What if I lose another one? Aeson was so difficult, and Asa got so sick, and now this…” It was hard to even make out what she was saying, really, between the congested sound of her voice and the little hiccups from lingering sobs. Beau wondered, briefly, if she’d already been crying that day, if he’d just missed that she was crying in the midst of his own distraction and upset over the loss.
She couldn’t have been, though, for the way she shifted a hand to wind tightly into his shirt and pressed her face closer against his chest. “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry, I didn’t know… I should have gone to the doctor earlier, I’m so sorry.” She sniffled, and Beau shushed her softly, carding his hand through her hair in an attempt at a comforting motion. He didn’t know that he could do much now, especially as she started to cry harder again, but he was doing his best, and he kept that hand moving through her hair as he spoke again.
“It’s not your fault. None of it is your fault, you couldn’t have known.” Really, between Asa being sick and the stress of both of their businesses, neither of them could have known it would cost them this much. There was no way to know, or so the doctors had told them. There was no way anyone could have known. Still, he knew she was blaming herself as much as he was, and who could blame them for that? It was their child. Their child to be, and they had failed it. “It’s not your fault. It’ll be okay. We’ll be okay.”