Chapter 324: Hope is going to be fine
She had told herself she would just check the chart. Just confirm the numbers. She hadn’t meant to come this close.
But she heard her sister crying, and something in her, the same something that had walked out into the garden a few weeks ago and pressed the gate release before she’d consciously decided to carry her forward into the room.
Not close. Not all the way. Just close enough.
"She’s going to be okay, Amira," Amara said. "Hope is going to be fine. You don’t have to worry."
Amira wiped at her eyes and turned.
She looked at her sister standing there in the doorway of her daughter’s recovery room the same face, the same blood, the woman she had wronged in every way a person could be wronged and who had still, despite all of it, made sure a little girl who wasn’t even biologically hers had the best doctors in the country.
There was no hate in Amara’s eyes.
There hadn’t been, Amira realized, this whole time. Just tired, careful love, rationed out in the only doses she could currently afford.
"Thank you," Amira said quietly. "For everything."
Amara nodded once, and didn’t come any closer, and didn’t need to.
It was enough, for now, just to stand in the same room.
—-
Amara stepped out into the corridor and went straight into Julian’s arms, the tension of the past weeks finally allowed to leave her body all at once. He held her, one hand smoothing over her hair, both of them quiet with the particular relief that doesn’t need words the kind that just needs to be felt in someone else’s chest.
"She’s going to be okay," Amara murmured into his shoulder, half to him, half to herself, testing the sentence to see if it would finally hold its weight.
"She is," Julian said.
That was when they heard footsteps quick, uneven, someone walking faster than the corridor’s quiet usually allowed.
Amira came toward them with her hands pressed together in front of her, fingers laced and white-knuckled, the posture of someone holding herself together by main force.
"Amara." Her voice was unsteady. "Can I talk to you? Just for a second. Please. It’s urgent, I’m begging you."
Amara straightened, some old instinct in her sharpening at the word begging, but she nodded. "Alright."
"I’ll leave you two to talk," Julian offered, already stepping back.
"No," Amira’s hand came up slightly. "Julian, please. If you don’t mind. You can stay too."
He glanced at Amara, who gave the smallest nod, and the three of them walked to the office near the ward, Amara leading, Julian a quiet, steady presence half a step behind.
Inside, Amira didn’t sit. She stood near the window with her arms wrapped around herself, and it took her a long moment to find the first word.
"I’m sorry," she said finally. "For everything. I know it means nothing now. But I want you to know I’m truly sorry, and I’m not the selfish person I was years ago." She drew in a breath that shook on the way in. "That’s why I have to tell you something."
Amara waited. Beside her, Julian had gone very still, watching.
"It breaks my heart," Amira said, "but I have to do it. For her. Even if I don’t know whether it’s what’s best for her, I have to." The tears were already falling, steady, unstoppable.
"Three years ago, I found Hope. In front of my apartment, in the hallway. I asked around I tried, I did try but no one knew where she’d come from. So I adopted her."
She pressed a hand briefly over her mouth, then made herself go on.
"A few weeks ago I went to see Leo. I met a woman there, Yvette. She told me she’d had triplets, and that one of her babies went missing from the hospital the day she was born." Amira’s voice cracked open completely now.
"Hope might be that baby. I swear to you, Amara, I swear, I had no part in whatever was done to get her to me. I found her. I didn’t take her from anyone. I just found her and I loved her."
The room was silent except for her crying.
Amara stood very still, one hand pressed flat against her own chest, as if she could hold something inside it by force alone.
She could see, clearly, painfully clearly exactly how much Amira loved that child. She could see, too, exactly what this confession was costing her, not an apology offered cheaply, but the one thing in the world Amira had left to lose, handed over voluntarily because she’d decided it was the right thing to do.
Amara didn’t know what to say. For once in her life, nothing arranged itself into the right words.
Amira wrapped her arms tighter around herself, steadying.
"I just wanted you both to know," she said quietly. "I’ll take Hope to Yvette myself, once she’s fully recovered and ready to be discharged."
She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, and without waiting for a response, walked out of the office.
The door clicked shut behind her.
Amara and Julian stood in the small, quiet room, neither one finding anything to say. Outside, somewhere down the corridor, a small girl who didn’t yet know her own name might soon be different was sleeping peacefully, unaware that the ground beneath her was about to shift.
—-
The days that followed felt to Amira like a slow, deliberate reckoning as though the universe had decided to weigh out, in small and exact amounts, everything she had taken from people who never deserved to lose it.
She had not believed, before Hope, that she was capable of loving anyone the way she loved that child. Not even knowing now whose blood ran in those small veins changed that.
If anything, it sharpened it made every hour she had left with her feel borrowed, urgent, precious in a way that hurt to hold.
She made the call to Yvette herself.
"Come to the foundation," she said, when Yvette picked up, her voice carefully even. "I need you to see Hope."