The McRae Series 01 - Twelve Days Sam and Rachel

had lost too much blood. The doctors couldn't get it to stop. She'd been outside in the cold for so long and in shock and they'd had to do something quickly, or she would have died, too. As a last-ditch effort at saving her, they'd removed her uterus, which had stopped the bleeding. It also meant she'd never have children.
    "They couldn't save the baby," Rachel said simply. "And I had some trouble afterward, and I couldn't have any more children. It was just one of those things. We hit a patch of ice on the road. That was it."
    Emma stayed there close by Rachel's side, and they watched Grace, shaking the rattle and smiling and trying to get it into her mouth.
    "I'm sorry," Emma said again.
    Rachel pulled the girl to her and gave her a big hug. Or maybe Emma gave her one. Grace sat in the corner with the rattle that should have been Rachel's daughter's, and in a little while, she'd wear the gown that should have been her daughter's, as well.
    Life went on, it seemed. She'd opened the chest she'd planned to fill with keepsakes from all the special moments in her life, as her mother and her grandmother had done before her, and she hadn't fallen apart.
    She remembered so clearly her grandmother's cedar chests. On slow winter days, when it was too cold to go outside and they'd exhausted every possibility for playing indoors, her grandmother would take them upstairs to one of her chests. They'd open them up and one by one pull things out, and her grandmother would tell them stories about each thing and the person it belonged to. Rachel always thought it an incredible sign of riches—all the memories, all the little stories. There were old dresses of her mother's and aunts'. Drawings. Report cards. Postcards. Letters. Photographs. Toys. Baby blankets. Tiny shoes.
    Rachel had long ago stopped putting mementos in her cedar chest. She didn't open it up and remember. Not until now. She supposed that was progress.
    "Do you ever wonder why God lets bad things happen?" Emma asked.
    It took Rachel's breath away. "Yes."
    "Me, too."
    "Bad things have happened to you?" she asked carefully. "Before your mother went away?"
    The girl looked so sad. "Yes."
    "What happened, Emma?"
    "We had to leave.... My father was..." she said haltingly, fighting to get out each word.
    Barely breathing now that Emma was finally giving up some of her secrets, Rachel whispered, "Why?"
    "He was bad," she said simply, as if that were all she could bare to say.
    "Bad... how?"
    "He yelled a lot." Emma looked up with frightened eyes.
    "What else?" Rachel coaxed the words out of her.
    "He scared me, and... and he hurt my mom."
    Oh, no. "He hit her?"
    Emma nodded, tears in her eyes now.
    "And you and your mother and Zach and the baby ran away from him?"
    "We had to," Emma said in a rush, now that she'd gotten that much out. "Mom said he would have hurt us one day if we hadn't."
    "And you believed her?" Rachel said. "That he would have hurt you?"
    "I guess.... Maybe. He scared me."
    "Then you had to get away," Rachel reassured her. "If that's the way it happened, you did the right thing."
    "You think?"
    "Yes. I'm sure."
    "I still miss him," Emma confessed. "Even after everything, I miss him."
    "That's why your mother's afraid of the police? Afraid they'll make you all go back to your father?"
    Emma nodded. "Zach doesn't know. Just me and Mom."
    "Oh," Rachel said.
    "She told me in case anything ever happened to her. In case I was the only one to take care of Zach and the baby. She didn't want us to go back." Emma started crying then. "You won't make us go back, will you?"
    "Oh, Emma."
    "I'm not supposed to let anyone take us back there, and I'm scared. I'm scared my mom won't come back and that we'll have to go back there and that he's really mad at us now."
    "Emma, I don't know what's going to happen. I don't know where your mother is or when she's coming back, and I don't know anything about your father. I don't know a lot about the law in cases like this, but I meant what I said earlier. You and your brother and the baby can stay here as long as you need to. I promise. And if..."
    She was going to say she'd protect her from her own father, but honestly, how could Rachel do that? She'd already seen how the system worked, and a biological parent's rights were so hard to break. They'd learned that with Will. Will had gone back to his biological mother, despite everything Sam and Rachel had done and everything his mother had done. What if someone decreed that these