The air in the room felt like it had been sucked out by a vacuum. Marina’s voice, distorted slightly by the phone’s small speaker but unmistakably hers—warm, melodic, and carrying that slight lilt she got when she was nervous—filled the nursery. I sank to my knees on the hardwood floor, the phone trembling in my hand.
“My love,” she said again, her voice cracking. “If you’re hearing this, it’s because nobody told you the truth. And because I knew, Ignacio. I knew weeks ago that I wouldn’t be coming home with you.”
I gasped, a jagged sound that tore at my throat. She knew?
“I saw the look on the specialist’s face in the city,” the recording continued. “The one I went to see when I told you I was just going shopping with my mother. My heart, Ignacio… it was failing. They called it peripartum cardiomyopathy. They told me the strain of labor would likely be too much. They told me I should consider… options. But I looked at the ultrasound, and I saw her. I saw April. And I knew I couldn’t trade her life for a few more years of mine.”
I looked at the baby. April. The name I had forbidden myself from thinking. She was staring at me, her dark eyes wide and eerily calm, the little red bracelet catching the dim light of the phone screen.
“I hid the tests, Ignacio. I hid the medicine. I didn’t want your last months with me to be shadowed by a countdown. I wanted you to laugh. I wanted those midnight street corns to be about joy, not a goodbye. But I worried. I worried about what would happen to you if I wasn’t there to bridge the gap between you and her. I know you, Mi Amor. You love with your whole soul, but when you hurt, you turn into a stone. I knew you’d look at her and see my ghost instead of your daughter.”
