I’m so tired of town folk patting me on the shoulder to say how sorry they are. ‘I’m sorry’ is too trivial. ‘I’m sorry’ won’t bring my family back. ‘I’m sorry’ won’t blot out the memory of my daughter, born to this world after she’d already left it. Those words won’t bring back my wife either. I wanted to kill that doctor. I would have done it too, but Jimmy was there with me that night and he wouldn’t let me. Of course that didn’t stop Jimmy from roughing him up some. I still don’t understand what would make a healer do that. I could hear her screaming "cut it out!" but I didn’t understand. The doctor had brought a nurse, and she told me it was best I didn’t see Nicole. They just didn’t want me to see all that blood, my wife’s blood. How could any man understand that a doctor, a man trained to make people better, would cut an infant out of its mother’s womb, knowing she wouldn’t survive.  If he hadn’t listened maybe I’d still have Nicole. I didn’t get to say goodbye. I didn’t get my daughter. I didn’t get to die with my family. I know it doesn’t help to ask a book why the doctor listened to her, but that question won’t stop repeating itself in my head. Why? The doctor said the same miserable words "I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Mr. Cross, but there was nothing I could do." But there was so much he shouldn’t have done.

The only thing that held me together was Jimmy. He stayed with me that night. He kept me from violence. He kept me from destroying myself. He stayed for weeks. He wept with me. He cursed the injustice with me. He mourned with me. He starved with me. He drank himself sick with me. He said no real friend would leave me like I was. He didn’t try to shove a load of bull down my throat about loving again. He didn’t go on about getting back on the horse after it’s thrown you. He was just there. He was rock solid when my world was liquid. We became more like brothers than we ever did in the past. Something grew solid between us-brotherhood, stronger than blood. 

I got visits from the rest. Emma even stayed a while to see to me. She left angry with me because I wouldn’t let her clean out the nursery. She said it wasn’t healthy, but she didn’t understand. She should have. She lost a child. Nicole folded those baby clothes. She knitted those blankets. The booties. She made them with her hands. We painted that room together. Green. We painted it a light green so that it would be okay for a boy or a girl. There’s a paint spot on the floor. I tripped over the bucket, and started to get angry about it, but Nicole just took some more paint and made it a big green heart on the floor. I thought she’d gone a little crazy with her pregnancy, but the next day, after it had dried, she took left over paint from our kitchen project a few months before, and wrote in the heart, "Welcome baby Cross." 

So, now I’m at a loss. My wife is gone. My child is gone, and today I got the letter. My brother is gone. My friend was shot in the back while playing cards. Some coward took him with a cheap shot in the back. So now again, I’m left asking, why?