Free Mommy by Mistake by Rowan Coleman

something would go terribly wrong.
    It had started at conception. Jess had longed to be pregnant again but feared it, too, because it filled her with the promise of hope and loss in equal parts. She had been pregnant twice before. The first baby had been lost before the end of the first trimester. It had broken her heart, but eventually she had been able to accept it. But the second, her little girl, was stillborn nearly six months into the pregnancy.
    Even now Jess could not bear to think of that gray morning in the delivery suite, with the rain rushing against the window and the faded frieze of bunny rabbits painted around the ceiling. It was the knowing that made it unbearable, the knowledge that every contraction that wracked her body wasn’t bringing a new life into the world. Knowing that she was delivering a dead baby, a little girl who had somehow died in the womb. In her womb.
    Between the waves of physical pain Jess could hear the cries of other children somewhere on the ward. She would always remember the laughter and joy of a family ringing off the walls in the corridor outside, and wanting to scream for them to shut up. But all she could do was to stay as quiet as she could with Lee at her side, holding her hand, telling her she was so brave and how much he loved her, brushing away his tears between reassurances.
    What Jess found almost unbearable was that the baby had died without her even noticing her passing. That she hadn’t even been able to do that much for her child, to reach inside and try to say good-bye. She felt that she should have known her baby was terribly sick, but instead she might have been asleep or shopping or sitting on the Tube reading the paper when it happened. It seemed such a banal way to lose a child.
    It was no one’s fault, the doctors told them; sometimes tragedies just happen, but that didn’t comfort Jess at all. She always felt it should have been someone’s fault—and if it was anybody’s it had to be hers.
    Lee had wanted them to stop after they lost the second baby. He said that the doctors had told him there was plenty of time to wait and try again in a year or two. That there was no reason why Jess shouldn’t carry a baby full term and deliver a healthy child. But Jess had not been able to wait. She told Lee she wanted to try again straightaway. That had been hard for him to understand.
    “It would be like putting my life on hold,” she had tried to explain to him one morning. “Like the next year, or two years would be just treading water waiting for…what? There’s never going to be a magic time when we know for sure everything will be all right. And I’m still going to be scared, Lee. I’m still going to be terrified even then. I need to try again now .”
    Lee had sat on their sofa, his head bowed over his knee. “The thing is,” he said eventually, still staring hard at the floor, “I don’t think I’m ready, Jess. I’m still grieving, I’m still missing…her. I…I don’t think it’s right to just…replace her.”
    Those last two words had almost been the end of them. It would have been the end of them if either one had had enough strength to survive without the other. But neither one had. They’d clung on to each other despite everything, and less than a year later Jess discovered she was pregnant for the third time.
    When she told Lee, he didn’t hug her or smile, he just looked at her for a long time saying nothing at all until eventually he rested the back of his cool hand against the heat of her cheek and said, “It will be all right.”
    They didn’t tell anyone about the baby until Jess was three months gone. She gave up work straightaway, forfeiting any rights she had to maternity leave. Lee said it would be a struggle butthey’d manage, and that her health and well-being was what counted. She knew what he really meant was that he’d do anything to stop her from freaking out.
    At the twenty-week scan Jess felt as if she was being