Sweet Romance15 min read
I Woke Up in Labor—and Got a Second Chance
ButterPicks12 views
"I can't—" I gasped, pain tearing through me like a struck bell.
"Don't move," a calm, clipped voice ordered.
"No! I won't! It hurts too much!" I cried, fingers clawing at the coarse hospital sheet.
"Almost there. Breathe," the doctor said, then added with a practiced softness, "Isabel, use your breath. Don't shout."
Isabel. The name made me blink through the fog.
I opened my eyes and stared at the yellow bulb swinging above—an old hospital lamp that hummed. The smell of disinfectant and boiled cabbage wrapped around me. A nurse hovered, more routine than tenderness. My head felt like someone had beaten a drum inside.
"Isabel Schmitt," the doctor repeated. "Push on my count."
I pushed without thinking. Pain exploded. Then something stranger than pain—an electric recognition—flashed across my mind. I wasn't in the future. I wasn't dead. I was back. Back on the day I had my children.
"I'm reborn," I thought in a voice that I kept to myself. "I have time. I can change things."
"Isabel, you're pale," the doctor said. "Keep breathing."
My memory poured in like rain. I remembered taking the marriage ring off in the night, the whispered plans of escape, and the cold water. I remembered the river and the final bitter absence of breath. I remembered the two people who had smiled while they led me away—my cousin and a man I thought a friend.
"Don't think about it now," the nurse said. "There, that's it—her head—one more big push."
The baby's first cry shredded something inside me. Then another little life sounded. Twins. The hospital smelled suddenly of life and boiled broth and the old, inevitable hope of the eighties news on the black-and-white set.
Outside the delivery room the door burst open and Christopher Dodson strode in like a figure from a poster: tall, precise, the kind of man who made careful choices as if the world were a chessboard and he the only player to trust. He was wind and steady hands and an iron jaw drawn into worry.
"Isabel!" He found my fingers, pulled me close. "Are you all right?"
"I—" My voice broke. I looked at him and remembered everything.
"You're crying," he said, surprised at my name on his lips.
"I—look at our children," I whispered. I smiled because I could. I had one more chance.
He held the two babies—one a tight, wrinkled boy, the other a red, pink girl—and his face, usually a map of control, softened like a curtain folding.
"She's perfect," he breathed when the nurse handed him the daughter. "And our son as well."
"Do you—" I started.
"Names," he said, already looking at me seriously. "Our son will be Christopher Jr.—no, wait—one that is strong but not boastful. He will be called Barrett Farley." He spoke as if the name existed in his hands.
I laughed despite the exhaustion. "You are so precise!"
"And our daughter?" he asked, more quietly.
"Please," I said, surprising myself, "let her carry my name."
He looked at me as if I had asked the moon to turn blue. Then he nodded, slow as a promise. "She will be named Isabel. She will carry your name."
My heart lurched. The way he said it—a man of his standing and habit of rules—was a defiance of the world around us. In the eighties that would be scandal to some, but to him it was simple fairness.
"You are absurd," I said, and he let himself smile.
They wrapped the tiny people in thin cloth. Our son—already a stubborn, sleepy boy—squealed and then settled. Our daughter nuzzled and latched. For the first time since the nightmare I had awoken from, I felt whole.
Outside, my brother-in-law Cael Bradley paced and watched as if the world might break. He held the thermos of milk like a talisman.
"Brother," Cael said to Christopher when he finally found his voice, "you did well."
"She did well," Christopher corrected automatically. "Isabel did all of it."
From the first hours I knew that memory would be my secret engine. I could hear the day I had been led away like a recording: the two smiles, the late-night whisper of 'we'll make it better,' the shove toward a river, the hush, the cold. I pressed my hand to where a scar might have been had those beacons not existed. This time, I would keep them.
"Christopher—" I said later, when the visitors had left and the babies slept like two small mountains—"promise me something."
He looked at me like he already anticipated the next line.
"Tell me everything. Tell me what you are. Tell me who can help. I... I must not be alone this time."
"I've been nothing but yours to protect," he said softly. "But now, more than ever, you will not be alone."
The days after were almost unbearably tender. Christopher refused to leave the hospital. He sat like a sentinel, still bandaged and rubbing at a bruise he called small—an old wound he refused to inflate into complaint.
"Go home and rest," my mother-in-law Teresa Johansen scolded, hovering. "You will wear yourself out."
"She is not—" Christopher began.
"Christopher, you should sleep," she insisted. "A good soldier can rest."
"Teresa," he said, and his tone shut the room down, "my wife just gave me our children. I will not leave."
Then, like the ripple before a wave, the old, familiar disdain that had existed in the family resurfaced. Some relatives couldn't bear the new configuration: a wife from a simple background with children named partly after her. There was a woman—Felicity Pinto—whose smile never touched her eyes. She had been present at the wedding and had said small cruel things to me then, and continued now, whispering to others until a plan had taken shape in her head.
"She will never be one of us," Felicity hissed to a ring of nodding relatives one evening. "Do you realize what this will mean? A child carrying her name? It is—ridiculous."
"She's obstinate," said Guillermo Beil, a man with a pleasant face and a dangerous patience. "She will leave. She will take the money, and one of the family will be tasked with cleaning up the shame."
Felicity laughed like a blade. "Or we take the use of the house, and the rest is simple care. She will not hear the end of it."
A third voice, calm and cold, belonged to Leonie Malik. She nodded as if closing a book. That was the night plans hardened. I felt it like a bruise on my future.
I did nothing obvious at first. I let Christopher have the warm moments. I watched Cael play awkwardly with the babies and be cheered for it, and I watched the way Christopher became slow with me in private—soft, careful, the way a man touches the edge of a glass so it will not shatter. When he smiled at me those quiet times, my chest felt like a bell tuned to mercy.
But memory is a teacher. I remembered the way Felicity had lied to me once about a letter, how Guillermo had once bankrolled a scheme to take what belonged to others, how Leonie had smiled when the river took my breath. My mind would not rest.
"Christopher," I said one night, "I want you to let me handle the small things."
He turned, concern making a map across his brow. "Isabel—"
"No," I interrupted. "Not out of cowardice. Out of prevention. Let me see the money paperwork. Let me sign things you might have signed last time. Let me say 'no' when Felicity applies the old pressure."
He searched my face and then nodded. "You will do as you need."
Weeks passed and the house settled into a new rhythm. I learned to feed a baby with my left hand while stirring soup with my right. Christopher learned lullabies and hummed them with a voice I loved like simple wood. The children grew; our daughter Isabel would open her eyes and study the world as if deciding whether the world had earned the right to exist. Our son Barrett—Barrett Farley—was the kind of small man who seemed to sleep heavily so he could practice being strong.
Then the theft attempt happened.
At first, it was small: a nurse who seemed to suggest we not let the daughter feed at my breast in public, "for propriety." Then Felicity, loud in the corridor, suggested that I was a poor choice for household management, that perhaps I should go away and let more experienced hands take the strain.
"I will not," I told Christopher. "Not now."
He only tightened his jaw. "Then we'll stay close."
One morning, I saw a nurse I had never met walking past the ward with a bundle carefully wrapped. My heart turned over. She passed like a shadow, and instinct told me she was moving deliberately towards the exit.
"Excuse me," I croaked, and then found myself out of the bed, chasing her with my gown flapping.
"Isabel—" Christopher ran after me.
The nurse was at the door. My feet felt like lead. The bundle in her arm was the child. My daughter. The world became a bright, high-pitched noise.
"Who are you?" I demanded, clamping to the handle of the door like a lifeline.
"I—I'm covering a shift," she stammered. "I was asked—"
"By whom? Who asked you?" I said, my voice sharp as broken glass.
She faltered. "By—by Mrs. Pinto and Mr. Beil. They said to take her to be checked."
"What clinic? Who gave you authority?" I grabbed the bundle. The child's face was streaked with something and muffled by fabric that smelled faintly of foul water.
Christopher burst through the door and took the baby. His face was a storm.
"You will tell me the name of the person who sent you," he said, quiet but with a weight that made the nurse shake.
She named them. Guillermo Beil and Felicity Pinto.
The world split open. I could not think of the river anymore as memory only; I could see the night when I had planned to take the chance to leave and who had given me the route. I remembered the smallness of their voices in the dark. I remembered the shove. This time I would go after truth.
Christopher took the nurse to the hospital office. The hospital director’s eyes widened at the allegation. Within an hour, the two conspirators were summoned to the ward. It was not a quiet investigation. It was public.
Felicity arrived in her usual bright coat, a shawl of perfume and smiles. Guillermo followed, an air of irritation like a man who expects the world to be a polite theatre in which he has a bought-middle row.
Christopher met them in the corridor with the flat steel of his voice. "You were involved in an attempt to remove my child from the hospital without my consent. Is that correct?"
The corridor filled like a bowl. Nurses peered. Patients' family members clustered like moths. The word 'child' hung in the air.
Felicity's smile faltered. "I only—" she began, and then the staff support changed the tone into one of accusation.
"You had a nurse take my daughter out of the hospital," I said. My voice did not break. I had rehearsed this scene in my mind across nights and impossible hours. "You hired someone to pretend to be an employee. You intended to remove her."
Felicity spluttered. "Isabel—"
"Don't," Christopher said. His hand on my back was a rock. "You will answer the director in front of these witnesses."
The director's face blanched. "We will call the authorities if necessary," he said, the act of authority like closing a gate.
"Yes," I said. "Call the police."
"Isabel, think—" Felicity started, but Guillermo shoved a palm out.
"Think?" he said, laughing. "We did what anyone smart might do."
"You are thieves and cowards," I said. "You used someone else to do your dirty work to steal a baby because you thought you could take the money and the house."
Guillermo's laugh died. "You will not have the house and the money and—"
"You will answer for this in public," Christopher said. "You will apologize to Isabel and the children, or you will face the law."
She went through a stage of bluster, then denial, then collapse. The corridor spun as neighbors and nurses whispered, some taking out their small cameras, some standing with silent judgment. Guillermo’s face changed—first red, then pale, then an inner panic I could taste like dust.
A crowd formed, and the hospital director, a man who had seen many scandals, decided the spectacle would be handled with public clarity. He summoned security. The police were called.
Felicity, who had always believed in social cover, had no shield now. She tried to flip the script. "I was merely concerned! As a family—"
"A family that plans kidnapping," Christopher cut in.
People who had not bothered before listened now. Mrs. Pinto, you have praised my family on tea days and yet trusted a nurse to steal a newborn. How can anyone not see your betrayal?
The police arrived and took statements. The nurse broke under questioning and told them everything: the money she had been offered, the instructions, the meeting place. Guillermo and Felicity were charged with conspiracy. Leonie Malik’s name surfaced in the testimony later as the one who contacted the nurse and gave details. The facts spread through the hospital like heat.
Then the punishment—public not merely in a court, but in the place where the crime had been attempted—unfolded the following morning. I will record it because I must.
The hospital’s foyer was full. Staff, family, visitors—two hundred people at least—clustered into a human ring. The director believed that an example must be set, not in rage but in fact. He had Felicity and Guillermo called to the front, and he read the verified damages, the false identities, the attempt to remove a minor from the hospital:
"You attempted to remove a newborn under false pretenses. You arranged payment for the nurse and you tried to deceive hospital staff. For that, we have reported your names to the police."
Felicity's face first went white, then crimson. "Director, you cannot do this—"
"You had an opportunity to explain to the family," the director said. "Instead, you manipulated another person and endangered a newborn."
A woman in the crowd, a patient who had overheard everything, spat, "How dare you play at kindness and go so low?"
The murmurs turned to a steady, cold chorus: "Shame. Shame. Shame."
Felicity leaned forward, gripped the edge of the table. The director asked her, in plain voice, to confess publicly and apologize. She tried to speak elegantly, but her words tangled. "I—I'm sorry if—"
"Say it clearly," I asked, my voice steady as iron. "Tell everyone you conspired to take a child. Tell them why."
She gaped at me. Then she swallowed and a cracked confession spilled out. "I was jealous," she admitted, which is the stupidest, most human reason for a monstrous act. "I wanted what you have. I thought we'd be better off if—if we had what she had. I paid a nurse. I'm sorry."
The crowd reacted as a living thing. "Wow," said a woman. A teenager recorded on her phone. An elderly man said, "Good God." A child pointed and whispered, "Mommy, why is she crying?"
Guillermo, who had tried to maintain composure, turned to me and sneered. "You'll lose it all, Isabel. Mark my words."
Christopher stepped forward like a cut from a blade. "Because you did it," he said coolly, "you must make restitution. You will be barred from our house. You will publicly apologize and you will lose social standing that was built on lies."
Then the hospital did something brave and small: they published on the notice board and sent notices to local workplaces that Felicity Pinto and Guillermo Beil had been involved in a conspiracy to abduct a minor. Work colleagues whispered. Cecilia from the kitchen said she would not serve them anymore. The church did not invite them to sleep under the community roof. Small town sanction. Big pain.
But that was not all. In the town square, where small businesses gathered, the local community organized a daytime assembly. Felicity was made to stand on the small platform and read her confession aloud. She read and then tried to apologize to me and Christopher, and then the crowd took over. Some clapped; many hissed. Someone took a photo that would circulate in every business window for months: Felicity, hands shaking, face in a map of public exposure.
Guillermo's punishment was different. He tried to flee to his job at the supply office as if that could shield him. Instead his employer received a letter detailing his involvement. He was dismissed before he could stand. The man who had thought money could smooth guilt found himself alone and jobless. He came to the house once, pleading, "Forgive me." Christopher answered in a voice that made you feel falling. "You never afforded us the decency of truth. You will not take from us again."
Leonie Malik tried to keep distance. She had been a lesser player in my death before, more a whisperer than a hand that pushed. But evidence linked her: a note, an overheard phone call, a ledger entry. She was called to a public meeting where witnesses spoke, one after another. The humiliation was not just private; it was a social unmasking. Some of the kinsfolk who had once nodded at her in polite gatherings turned away. Children interrupted their games to ask their mothers, "Is she bad?" and women in the market spat into their palms and refused to sell produce to her.
"What did I do?" Leonie whimpered before the whole market.
"You betrayed a woman who had no place to defend herself," Christopher answered. "You pushed her toward death for a scheme that would make you richer at her ruin. You must live with what you did."
She left town with only an insult of family behind her and a small bag. The public’s reaction was not bloodthirsty in that moment; it was a collective, cold judgment that worked slowly—she would finish her days under the weight of small slights and relentless gossip. That is a kind of punishment, one that breaks reputations into dust.
Afterward, people spoke kindly to me and the children. The babies were safe. The nurse who had been coerced cried and apologized and then worked with us, her hands shaking as she soothed the infant. She later volunteered at the clinic for free, trying to undo something she had been paid to do wrong. Felicity and Guillermo’s names traveled with them as labels: "thief," "traitor," "coward." And like many who choose to hurt others, the man who had the most to lose—Guillermo—lost it quickly.
I stood at the window that night, the twins asleep and Christopher across the room looking as if the world had hammered him into a kinder shape. He came to my side and kissed my hair. "You were brave," he said.
"I couldn't have done it without you," I answered.
"No," he said, and his hand tightened on mine. "You were the one who remembered. You were the one who did not run."
There were many small heart-stopping, soft moments after that. He smiled at me in the kitchen when he roasted the meager chicken until the children fell asleep to the smell. He took off his coat and used it as a blanket for our daughter in the crib because we had no more small quilt than his own shirt. Once, when the snow came early and the fire was low, he took off his gloves and tenderly warmed my fingers as I sat beside him, and I felt my heart skip in a way that was childish and true.
"You're ridiculous," I told him when I caught him watching me dance with Barrett—our son—in the morning sunlight.
"Ridiculous enough to love you," he said. "And to keep you."
Our family knit itself from fear and tenderness. Cael Bradley taught Barrett to whistle by making small wooden toys; he pretended to be bad at the games so the boy would win every time. Teresa made soups that smelled like patience. Hugh Barrett—the elder—came and cried the day he saw his grandchild, the words tripping from him like a penitent. He apologized for the times he had judged me sharply, and I accepted because my future now included a chance to forgive.
People change slowly or not at all, but sometimes they must change because the cost of not changing becomes higher than the cost of changing. Felicity paid publicly and privately. Guillermo's life narrowed until there was little left. Leonie left town. The gossip that once built them up now eroded them.
I sat at the window on a day when the wind smelled like pine and the city had that crisp ache of winter, and Christopher leaned against the frame with me. Barrett slept with a soft mouth-breath near the window, and Isabel—our daughter—kneaded at her blanket with curious fingers.
"Do you regret it?" I asked him, timid as a child again.
"Regret?" He looked at me like he had been surprised by the question. "I regret we had to fight."
"I regret my past," I said. "I regret that I didn't see sooner."
He pulled me close. "We have now," he said. "That's the point."
We had three heart-stopping moments that anchored our long pinch of happiness:
- The day he smiled at me in the delivery room when he handed me our daughter and said, "She will carry your name." — He was precise and stubborn and the way he broke his rules for us made my chest hurt.
- The night in the little kitchen when he put his gloves over my hands to warm them while the wind rattled windows—he had always been a man whose body remembered duty before tenderness. That night he learned to be tenderness first.
- When I stood in the hospital corridor and named the conspirators—my voice trembling and then steady—and Christopher held my hand like an oath. When the nurse told the truth, the world shifted. He did not raise a gun; he raised the law and the community and made them see.
The punishments, public and private, had been necessary. They had been full and ugly and deep as winter wells. The law had taken Guillermo; Leonie had lost her place; Felicity had been made to confess in company and then live in the shadow of the confession. I watched them change according to their own measure. Christopher paid the price too: scars and sleeplessness and more fretting than a man should have to show. But he was my man, and Barrett and Isabel were ours.
One night, months later, when the babies had learned the habits of sleep and waking, I sat with Christopher in the small kitchen. Isabel slept with her face in the crook of his arm, a small, fierce presence.
"Promise me something," I whispered.
"What?"
"Promise you'll keep telling me the truth. Even when it's hard. Promise you will not let them—" I gestured toward the empty spaces where our adversaries once stood—"—turn us into people we don't recognize."
He looked at me and the city around us and the two children who had survived thefts and plans and river nights.
"I promise," he said. "Here. With Barrett's first spoon in his hand and Isabel's thumb in her mouth."
He kissed me—quick and sure—and for a long time we sat, and the houses across the lane glowed, and the small life we had built hummed like a lamp whose light was earned.
This was my second chance. I had been given the brutal gift of knowing the edge of death and the tender gift of love that chose me anyway. I kept my children. I kept my husband. I learned how to make soup and to hold a baby while signing a legal document with one hand. We learned together to be a family that would not bow to rotten hands.
And when, rarely, the names of those who had betrayed me crossed my ears, I remembered the corridor, the public confession, the humiliation, and the small, slow mercy: the town's refusal to forget. That refusal was a kind of justice. It did not bring balm to all wounds, but it brought sense, and the two small people in the next room slept on—safe, and round with milk, and folded in a father's arms that had once been a soldier's only.
I pressed my forehead to Christopher's chest and listened to his heart. "Stay," I murmured.
"I will," he promised. "Because this is home now."
And I believed him.
The End
— Thank you for reading —