Substitute Daddy. Kate Welsh

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      Melissa felt her cheeks heat. “Leigh would have done the same for me. I know she would. And I’m not pretending it would have been easy to watch them raising her but—”

      “Her?” Brett arched one dark raven’s wing of an eyebrow. “Is that a guess? Wishful thinking?”

      Still excited over the ultrasound picture that had been done yesterday, Melissa jumped up. She was eager to change the subject and even more anxious to share the first picture of her child, even if it was only a shadowy black-and-white image that a technician had needed to explain.

      She handed Brett the picture. “They do these routinely now. And I got lucky. At sixteen weeks they can tell the sex if the baby’s in the right position and she was. That’s my baby girl.” Melissa’s voice broke and tears she tried to blink back welled up in her eyes.

      Leigh had so wanted a little girl.

      Not wanting to cry in front of Brett, Melissa quickly excused herself and fled the room. On the way to her grandparents’ bath just outside the downstairs bedroom, she caught sight of Leigh staring back at her from the hall mirror and froze in place. The incredible loss of her twin slammed into her once again with a two-ton force.

      It was a bittersweet pain that would have taken her to her knees were she not held in place by the sight before her. Leigh but not Leigh. Gone but never farther away than a mirror. Leigh would never age and yet she would. Her own reflection would forever remind Melissa of the incredible bond she and Leigh had shared and the void her loss left.

      Melissa didn’t know how long she stood there with her fingertips touching the flat cold face on the other side of the glass. She and that other part of her cried silently for both of them. The one lost and the one left behind. Only half of who she was but two people as well.

      Was she forever doomed to lose those she loved and relied upon?