I Fell in Love with Hope - Lancali

She gives me an apologetic sort of look, the kind you give when
you’ve been keeping a secret as monumental as this.
“You never said anything–”
“There was nothing to say.” She speaks as if the subject is moot. As
if any preventative measure would’ve been useless, and she
would’ve ended up here, anyway.
“Sammy the night we met, I told you I’d had a hiking accident, do you
remember?” Sony’s words overlap, slurring a bit from the drugs, but I
can make them out. She attempts to move her arm, to move closer
to me. Tears well in her eyes as she struggles, not from this pain, but
from another, older kind. “I lied to you, I’m sorry.”
“You don’t have to be sorry,” I whisper, catching beads of sweat on
her forehead with my sleeve.
“I am though. I’m so so sorry for what I did. I was young, and I didn’t
know what to do,” she cries. Neo, C, and Hikari stir, but they don’t
wake.
“Sony, it’s alright,” I whisper.
“I got pregnant,” she spurts out. And then I remember more clearly.
The bruises on her legs and the butterfly-stitched cuts on her face.
The anger. The way she kept touching her belly.
Sony’s breath hitches, saliva dripping down her chin. I wipe it with
my sleeve again, but Sony keeps on talking, trying to get it all out like
a nauseating bite of food. “My mom would’ve understood. She
would’ve helped me raise the
baby, but I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t tell her. The night I met you, I took
the car, and I drove until I wasn’t on the road anymore.”
The night we met, Sony had scans done. Scans that showed trauma
to her left lung. The lung they had to remove.