Chapter 3 - The Monitor
The next fifteen minutes broke into fragments. A stranger's voice telling people to move back. My grandfather crying somewhere above me. A paramedic asking how far along I was.
"Eight months," I said, in a voice that didn't sound like mine. "Five years. Please — we waited five years."
At 8:47 p.m., they wheeled me into the trauma bay. Someone cut my ruined dress away. Someone clipped a pulse oximeter to my finger. Someone asked who had pushed me.
"Her father," Ethan said, because I was crying too hard to answer.
Cold gel hit my stomach. The ultrasound wand pressed into bruised skin. The monitor glowed black and white, and I waited for the sound I knew better than any song on earth — that quick little gallop, thump-thump-thump, the rhythm that had made Ethan cry the first time we heard it.
Nothing came.
The doctor moved the wand. Pressed harder. His brow furrowed. Beside him, the nurse went still.
"Where is it?" I sobbed. "Where's the heartbeat?"
"Doctor?" Ethan's voice cracked.
The doctor's eyes flicked once to the trauma clock, then back to the screen. When he finally looked at me, his voice dropped so low the whole room seemed to lean toward him.
"Claire," he said, "I need you to listen very carefully. We're seeing a severe placental abruption. We have seconds here, not minutes."
The words didn't land all at once. They arrived like separate blows.
"Is my baby alive?" I asked.
He didn't lie to me. That was his mercy.
"There's cardiac activity," he said, "but it's dangerously weak. We need to deliver right now."
The room erupted. Someone called obstetrics. Someone called for an OR. A consent form appeared near my hand, though I could barely hold the pen.
Ethan bent over me. "Claire. Look at me. I'm here. I'm not going anywhere."
Then the curtain ripped open before anyone could stop it, and a security guard stood there with a woman holding a clipboard marked INCIDENT REPORT. Behind them in the hallway, my mother stood with her arms crossed. My father was pale and rigid beside her. Brooke cried into a tissue.
"She tripped," my mother said loudly, to no one and everyone. "This is being exaggerated."
Something in me went still. Not calm. Something cleaner.
I turned my head toward Ethan. "Don't let them near us."
He nodded once.
May you like
The doctor looked at security without hesitation. "Nobody from that hallway comes near this room. Document names if anyone tries."
Then they rolled me toward the OR, ceiling lights sliding past in bright rectangles, until the doors forced Ethan's hand out of mine.
