“Marcus, please,” I begged, reaching out my hand toward him. “He is our son. He needs us.”
He took a sharp step back, recoiling as if my touch would contaminate him.
“He is not my son, Bernice. I made it very clear to you and the doctors the kind of son I wanted. An heir. A champion. Not… that.” He pointed a trembling, accusing finger toward the clear plastic crib where the nurse was attending to Dante. “That thing is a mistake. A factory defect. And I won’t have it ruining my reputation.”
His words felt like physical stab wounds. Each syllable opened a new, bleeding gash in my chest. I wanted to scream. I wanted to fly out of that bed and beat him until he understood he was talking about our baby, about an innocent life that had just arrived in the world. But I was too weak, too tired, too broken.
“Get out,” I told him, turning my face away from him, toward the wall. “If you can’t love your own son, then get the hell out of here.”
And he left. He walked out of that delivery room in the maternity ward without looking back, without so much as a second glance at the child he had claimed to want so desperately. I stayed there alone, crying in a silence broken only by Dante’s soft coos, until the nurse gently brought him back to me. She placed him in my lap without saying a word. She just squeezed my shoulder affectionately, a silent gesture that said, “You can handle this.”
I looked at that little face, those eyes that were just beginning to open to the world, those tiny hands opening and closing, looking for something to hold on to. And in that quiet, white hospital room, I made the most important decision of my life.
