Bred In Violence (A Mafia Romance Book One) #𝐁𝐨𝐨𝐤 𝟏

Chapter 41

Me and you, we got more yesterday than anybody. We need some kind of tomorrow.

~Toni Morrison, Beloved~

*Unedited*

Raphael

I was about thirteen years when I became sexually active; it happened in an alley with an older girl. I don't really know how old she was, and honestly, I couldn't have cared. In almost two decades since that first time and still sexually active, I hadn't fathered any child, none that I was aware of. Yet I had been having sex with Sophie for a few months, and suddenly I had made her pregnant.

Maybe it's because I always carried a condom, but I didn't always do that with Sophie. She must have conceived on our last time together-we had come together in anger, passion, and exploded, making a baby out of it.

The doctor said Sophie had a miscarriage and not a missed miscarriage-he further explained that it happens when a baby dies in the womb without the body recognizing the loss of the pregnancy. Sophie didn't know she was pregnant, so hers couldn't be the latter, which gave her a lot of grief.

"What if I'm the only person ever to experience this? It could explain why there is no medical term for it."

"Millions of women don't know they're pregnant until the first check-up."

"None have a miscarriage."

"Of course they have."

"Then why don't they have a name for t?"

I Didn't know how to answer her, so I said nothing. I heard her crying at night, sniveling and sometimes crying in the shower, heartbreaking sobs that broke my heart, yet I didn't know how to help her. She had become hollow and miserable.

I tried telling her it wasn't her fault, but she would turn around and ask me what kind of a woman doesn't know she is pregnant?

"What if I'll never have a baby?"

"Then the doctor would have mentioned it."

"But no tests were done to determine that."

"Do you want to do the tests?"

"No. I don't want to know."

I walked on eggshells around her just in case I said something she would deem inappropriate.

She mostly kept to herself, talking to me only if I spoke to her first. I missed her-her bubbly self, the girl who joked with me, laughed with me, talked to me nonstop through the night without caring that I barely said a word.

But now that girl had disappeared in misery, tears, heartbreak, silence, and black.

She wore black every single day, and I hated it. I wanted to see her in white strapless dresses, denim skirts, shorts, and jeans yet I dared not say a word.

She rarely ate. I had to be there at all meals to make sure she ate at least something. We fought almost every time I forced her to eat, a battle she lost, and she despised losing it. But as twisted as it was, I loved those moments because it was the only time I got to interact with her fully; no smile just glares, but she argued with me, which was a win in my book.

The only other time I saw her talking or smiling was with Matteo. I don't know what they talked about, but at least she smiled. Even though I had relished thoughts of banishing Matteo from my house, I realized my feelings shouldn't matter; hers did. If Matteo made her smile, I was going to have to suck it up and deal with it.

But I often wondered how he did it. What exactly did he say that was funny? How comes I couldn't elicit a smile from her, and he could?

Once in a while, I drove her to a therapist; I figured she needed to talk to a professional, someone to tell her losing the baby wasn't her fault. I had tried, but apparently, my opinion didn't matter.