The only thing to overwhelm her feeling of grief was that of shame. Wendy had lived through the pain of losing both her mother and her father as well as her lover in the space of a few years, and here she was mourning an unborn baby. A foetus. An embryo. A biological organism. It had no name and it had no life, but she found herself grieving harder than she could ever have expected.
It had no form and it had no gender, but Wendy felt overwhelmed at the loss of what she saw as her little girl. It had always been a girl. Deep down, she knew that.
She could not shake the invasive, destructive feeling that it was her body that had killed the baby. If not her body, then her brain. Her stupidity. Just one foolish moment could end it all. A life which had no chance to flourish. A girl who had no chance to get married. A child who had no chance to have a mother. In more ways than one, she felt utterly empty.
Wendy thought back to her childhood. The times when she was happy. The times she had desperately wanted her child to have. A loving parent who epitomised the perfect role model. That was what she had had, and that was all she had ever wanted to be for her child. Those long, never-ending summers spent building tree-houses and dens, all concept of time lost in the innocence and pure unbounded joy of divine youth. All of these things that she had had and wanted her child to have. The child that would never have them. The child that would never even know it had existed.
For the first time since the day before, Wendy responded to the doorbell. She knew it would be Jack.
On opening the door to see him stood there with a large bouquet of lilies and a sorrowful look on his face, she crumbled and sobbed heavily into the crook of his shoulder. For Culverhouse, this was an uncomfortable situation in so many ways.
‘I… I don't know what to say.’
‘That doesn't usually stop you,’ Wendy remarked, in an attempt to maintain some normality, as though playing up to the character she knew she was. In real life. On any other day. In a world where her baby wasn't dead.
‘How do you feel?’ Culverhouse asked, at a loss for anything more prophetic to say.
‘I don't know. I really don't know.’
‘Did they… did they say anything about it?’
‘There's nothing they can say,’ Wendy almost whispered as she stared through red, tear-tinted eyes at the glass-panelled back door. ‘But I know it was a girl.’
‘Oh. Did you…’
‘Have a name for her? I didn't. But I do now.’
Culverhouse cocked his head to the side in anticipation of the answer.
‘Roberta. She would’ve been my little Bobbi.’