Chapter 10 - The Blue Cap
I pulled the old bread bag into the light of the hallway. Inside rested a tiny, meticulously knitted blue baby cap. I had made it myself with shaking hands twelve years earlier, sitting in a rocking chair when I was seven months pregnant.
Because I had a son.
Almost no one in this sprawling story knew that. Twelve years ago, I had not even met Eric yet. I was a young, fiercely dedicated woman serving active duty in the military. My baby’s father, a fellow soldier whom I loved deeply, had been killed in a tragic training accident just three months before our son was due to be born.
His death shattered my world. I went into early labor, delivering my baby entirely alone in a small, underfunded rural clinic in the middle of a thunderstorm at night. The delivery was brutal. I hemorrhaged, losing a massive amount of blood, and the pain finally dragged me under into a deep, dark unconsciousness.
When I finally woke up, groggy and terrified, Natalie was the only person sitting beside my hospital bed, tightly gripping my hand.
“He’s gone, Lauren,” she had whispered, tears streaming down her face. “He never took a single breath.”
I never saw my son. Not alive, and not even after he died.
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“I told the nurses to take him away so you won’t have to remember him that way,” she had told me, stroking my hair as I wailed in agony. She handled all the paperwork. There was no funeral. There was no grave. There was only her solemn word.
I believed her without question. Because she was my sister, and because I was far too physically and emotionally broken to demand answers.
