He stood up and walked over to the window. “So I had to sit back and watch as our child grew and she slowly slipped away from me. She insisted I keep up with my residency. The people at the hospital knew what I was going through, and they were good to me. We moved in with her parents because she couldn’t be alone when I was working. I kept hoping I’d wake up from the nightmare my life had become. I was all churned up and frantic, but Sarah was so calm and serene. She loved feeling the baby grow inside her. He was busy, moving all the time.” Smiling at the memory, Aidan turned back to Clare.

“What happened to him?” she asked in a small voice.

“She got to thirty-six weeks and was having trouble breathing because the cancer had spread to her lungs. Her OB scheduled a C-section, but the night before, she started to bleed. I rushed her to the hospital, and they took her right into the OR. They whisked her away so fast I can’t remember the last thing I said to her or what she said to me. It’s a total blank. They put her under to do an emergency C-section. The baby…” Aidan’s chin dropped to his chest, and he shook his head.

Clare got up to go to him. A wave of dizziness hit her when she stood up too fast, but she fought it off and put her arms around him.

Sobs racked through him. She held him until he finally pulled himself together and looked down at her with shattered eyes. “He was stillborn.”

“No,” Clare whispered.

“He was perfect with all his fingers and toes. They let me hold him, and I tried to convince myself he was only asleep. We’d already decided to name him after Colin—he was Sarah’s favorite of my brothers. She never came out of the anesthesia, and she died two days later. The only comfort was she didn’t know her sacrifice had been for nothing.”

Clare led him back to the sofa.

After a long period of silence, he took a deep shuddering breath. “They were buried together, but I wasn’t there,” he said, his voice reduced to a whisper. “I couldn’t go. My parents and hers took care of everything. I’ve never even been to the cemetery, which drives my mother crazy, but they go for me. I quit the residency. I couldn’t stand the smell of the hospital or knowing that even with all my training I hadn’t been able to save the two people I loved the most. It was just as well, because I spent most of the next year drunk anyway.”

“How did you end up here?”