The Bull Prince | Max Verstappen

SEQUEL - Chapter 40

Sooo, hello. Here is another chapter. I have nothing to say, to be honest, a rare thing I know. Anyways. I hope you enjoy it, don't hate me too much. I still refuse to use proper grammar and spelling, that's just the new normal now. Cheers!

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Realistically, Joanna knew that they were trying to figure out what was wrong and that she should pay attention, but felt as if someone has wrapped her into cotton wool. The sounds around her were dull, muffled. As if she was underwater. White noise, maybe that was it. Or she just died and watches the scene from the other side. It felt all the same to her, but more tragically, it didn't matter.

Joanna could see the mouths of the doctors moving but no sound reached her ears. The Austrian knew they were talking, she just couldn't understand. She had no idea if they were still speaking the same language to her. By now there were two doctors and a nurse in the room, speaking in hushed whispers.

The heartbeat. They could not find it. Max couldn't take it anymore and asked them what they were looking for and they told him. The heartbeat.

Joanna knew the word agony, had felt what it meant many times, but this time, she just felt numbed. As if someone had switched off her feelings as one would do with the lights in an empty room. Memories she wished would stay in the little box where they belonged broke out to terrorise her. She knew what it felt like to lose a baby. Knew the physical pain and the gut feeling which would so suddenly change, but she did not feel it this time.

She hadn't seen it coming. Not after she made it this far, further than ever before, not after getting the good news from their lawyers, not after having Max back.

She should have seen it coming. Nothing ever lasts, not in her life. Everything was changing, turning itself upside down, the pace was too fast, the breaks in all this chaos never long enough, not nine months long, not even seven. They would do with seven by now, but they were not granted such luxury.

A million things were going through her head and nothing at all at the same time. It's utter despair that flooding her system, it's the strange calmness she has before a race that's wrapping her in it's tight hug. Something is off, she knowns it. This situation shouldn't have occurred. She did not feel it, didn't notice as the penny dropped, as the coin finally stopped spinning.

She noticed herself reaching for her phone, something in the back of her mind told her that it was time to call Patrick, the gardener, tell him it was time to plant another rose bush in that specific corner in the garden. How's the saying? All good things are three. Yeah.

Joanna had no idea who started what her father only called garden of memory. Maybe a man who loved his wife despite all the miscarriages she suffered and wanted her to have the possibility to conclude with it. Or a woman, almost a mother but never quite, who could no longer take the silence. Couldn't bare another dead child which they would take from her arms, if she was even allowed to hold it, before throwing it into the waste to never again be mentioned. Medical waste. That's what her babies were destined to be.

A young woman would have other babies they always liked to say to cheer a woman up, but Joanna won't. She knew that at this very moment as she remembered what all the roses in the garden meant. The problem her family suffered since generations already. She would not try again, no matter who told her to, she wouldn't survive the loss of yet another baby, that was never meant to make her a mother.

For those we have lost, before they were ready her grandmother had written in her diary, another family heirloom she had found as she went to see if there was some of the furniture of her own childhood bedroom in the attic, of course there was nothing. It was the date of her sister's death Joanna later realised. After suffering the loss of a child, a young girl three years already, she climbed the stairs to the attic of their house and chose the strongest crossbeam before hanging herself there. She was not found in time.