The girl that Jill could never let go.

Jill’s greatest mistake. Jill’s biggest regret.

Jill’s first sin.

Because long before Jill had been responsible for killing her husband, she had been responsible for another death — her baby daughter.

Tony had had no idea he’d had a twin sister. And it was the reason Jill had been so afraid when she found out Mimi was having twins. She knew what those first few weeks were like. How hard the sleep deprivation was, and the constant sound of babies crying. The pain of cracked nipples and the expectations on the mother who bore the brunt of the parenting.

She was terrified of Mimi ending up in the same dark place she had. Of course, everything was different now, and husbands helped out more. Sometimes she wondered how things might have been if Frank had been more hands-on with the babies.

But she couldn’t blame him. She was the one to put Robin down to bed that day. She was the one to place her on her tummy. It was strange — Tony always hated sleeping on his stomach, but Robin loved it. She couldn’t sleep any other way.

Frank tried to tell her it wasn’t her fault. After all, no one knew any different back then. The advice about placing babies down to sleep on their backs didn’t even come in until the nineties. But he wasn’t there when it happened. He wasn’t the one to fall so deeply asleep on the couch, unaware that anything was wrong. Wasn’t the one who woke several hours later and wondered why she hadn’t already been woken by one of her babies crying. Usually Tony slept soundly for hours, but Jill could always rely on Robin to wake her before too long.

Frank wasn’t the one to walk into the bedroom and find Robin. Peaceful, so peaceful. Too peaceful.

A guttural scream had escaped her lips. An animalistic cry of pure pain. Pure anguish.

What about a mother’s instinct? Why hadn’t something kicked in? Made her wake sooner? In time to get to her baby girl? In time to rescue her.

For Frank, the easiest way to deal with the pain was to never speak of her again. For Jill, that was excruciating. She wanted to tell stories of Robin’s short life. She wanted to tell her boys about her cute little rosebud mouth. About her shock of thick dark hair. She wanted to talk about the colour of her eyes. She had bright blue eyes when she was born, but Jill would never know if they’d have turned brown like the rest of her boys’. She wanted to celebrate who Robin was. Have pictures of her up on the wall. She wanted to sing to her on her birthday when they sang to Tony. She wanted to remember.