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I can’t, won’t accept that. My body fills with rage, my leg bouncing, unable to stop the reactions from taking over. Not again. Please don’t let this happen again. I knew letting her travel this late in her pregnancy was a bad idea. I shouldn’t have let it happen.
They rush Ophelia into surgery and I’m forced to wait. Lost in the still and silent space my mind forces me into, between breathing, and thinking, I think about a life without her. It’s not one I want to exist in.
Thirty minutes later, a man appears in front of me. There’s blood all over his scrubs. I lift my head to meet his eyes. I try to analyze if this is the moment he’s going to tell me she’s gone.
He smiles. “Na u ka thabela ho bona morali oa hau?”
Parker leans into my shoulder. I stare at him. “What’d he say?”
“He asked if you’d like to see your daughter.”
I jump up. I don’t think I hear the daughter part. At least not at first. “My wife? Is she okay?” My words sound strangled, forced. They are. It takes everything in me to say it in fear that I’ve lost her. “Where is she?”
His smiles fades, his eyes blank. He looks at Parker. “Mosali?” And then me. “Wife?”
“Yes, my wife!” I’m raging, my pulse pounding in my ears. “Where the fuck is she?”
He motions for me to follow him. I do. He leads me to a hallway where Ophelia is covered with a blanket. She’s motionless.
I grab the doctor by the front of his scrubs and slam him up against the wall. “What’s wrong with her? Why is she in the hall?”
Sweat beads on his forehead, his black eyes wide. He says something. I don’t know what. I’m too blinded by rage to understand any of it. Carl and Parker step in and with the help of locals, they tell me she’s going to be transported to another hospital, and eventually back to the States. She’s needs a blood transfusion and I sure as shit ain’t letting that happen here.
Carl and Valarie help arrange everything when a nurse approaches me, holding my baby in her arms. She smiles at me. I step forward and there, wrapped in a white blanket, is my daughter, a head full of dark hair and pink cheeks. She’s small, but healthy. A daughter. I have a daughter.
Taking her in my arms, I hold her close to my chest and look down at Ophelia next to me, tears rolling down my cheeks. Immediately, this tiny little girl in my arms has my every thought, every ounce of my love the second she looks up at me.
“Hey, there, sweetheart,” I whisper, rocking her in my arms. She doesn’t cry, doesn’t make a sound but stares at me, as if she’s heard my voice before. For some reason, I flash back to the day my mom left us. How could she? I could never leave this girl. Ricky once told me there is something mythological about natural born racers. The ones that push the limits to the extreme and achieve the unthinkable. It’s in the blood of the ones that take their sanity to the edge, until they have nothing left to give. The mythological part comes in during those moments when they don’t think they have anything left to give, and find themselves at the end of a race. Somehow they find the will to push themselves further when they didn’t think they could.
For her, I had to push further. I had to find the will to be strong for her, and our daughter.
Leaning down, I kiss Ophelia’s forehead and whisper, “After everything we’ve been through, I won’t lose you again.”
I won’t. Me and this baby, we need her too much. I spend hours holding my daughter, in awe of how much she looks like me, and her mother. But it’s hard to enjoy those first hours with her because I don’t know if Ophelia is going to make it.
IT TAKES TWOdays and thousands of miles away from that scene in South Africa before Ophelia wakes up. A blood transfusion, and what they tell me is a bacterial infection in her kidneys, Ophelia meets our daughter for the first time.
I hold her in my arms, in awe that after everything, we’ve been given this gift together. I don’t care that I dropped out of the race with only fifty miles and seconds separating me from the top three guys. All that matters are these two people.
“What happened?” Ophelia asks when she comes around.
“Your placenta detached.” Her frantic eyes drift to the baby in my arms.
Though there’s panic in her features, relief washes over her that I’m holding the baby. “But the baby’s okay? Is it healthy?”
“She’s perfect.”
She gasps at the word, the realization that we have a daughter. For months Ophelia had been hoping for a girl, but convinced she was carrying a boy. “A girl?”
I nod, handing her to Ophelia. “Meet our daughter.”
The moment Ophelia sees our daughter, tears soak her face. “She’s beautiful, Roan. She’s so perfect.”
I brush my lips to her temple, holding the two of them in my arms. “Just like her mother.”
Taunting death for so long has allowed me to see there’s more than twisting a throttle. There’s this. Family.
I didn’t die. Thank God. Were you scared? I admit, I was there too for a little while. But that’s not where this story ends for Roan and I. Our story, it couldn’t end there. Not with everything we’d been through.