CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Present Day
I saw the baby a week ago. The ultrasound technician said she usually couldn’t see a heartbeat at five weeks, six days. But there it was, next to the yolk sac. A tiny flicker, 156 beats a minute. Strong, healthy, promising.
For an hour, I allowed myself a tiny speck of hope.
There was an amniotic sac, exactly where it should be, nestled in for a long journey.
There’s no reason it won’t survive. No reason.
I lean against the wall of the locker room. My stomach is beyond fucked up, and exhaustion settles over me. Then I hear a familiar voice fill the room, and a hand settles on my shoulder. I nearly jump to the ceiling, and I turn around to see my friend, Natalie. Another girl with a thing for fighters. She pulls me into a hug, and I relax into her. Even though she’s a few years younger, she’s been my best friend since what feels like the beginning of time.
“Natalie! Congratulations on your first shift!” I put on my peppiest voice, and thankfully—for once—a blush rises in my cheeks. When I looked in the mirror this morning, my skin was positively gray. The excitement takes me over, and I jump up and down with her and squeal. She makes me feel like we’re ten again, pretending that we’re nurses. But we’re doctors now, and as I hug Natalie, a feeling takes me over that’s stronger than nausea, more persistent than exhaustion. It’s a feeling of hope.
She brushes a silky blond lock behind her ear and looks down, almost embarrassed. “It’s so weird to be back in town,” she says.
I laugh and hug her again. For a second, it feels like there’s a stitch in my side, a throbbing pain, deep and low in my pelvis. But I ignore it. “You’re telling me, Nat. It’s weird as anything. It’s been—how long has it been?”
“Two years.” She smiles. I visited her at school on one brief trip home. I’d seen my mother and my aunt. And I had never run into Ash. The father of my child. My children. I gulp hard and almost start crying again. The idea of telling Natalie rests on the tip of my brain, but I know she has things to deal with that have nothing to do with me or that tall, redheaded man who’s wormed his way back into my life.
“You seen Josh yet?” I ask her. “He had a fight last night, right?”
“Yeah—he—I—I’ve actually got to get going.” She blushes, almost as bright pink as I do when I’m embarrassed. “End of my shift and all. There’s a bunch of stuff I’ve got to do today.” Natalie grins and squeezes me tight again before she picks up her purse and leaves, hair bouncing behind her, a spring in her step that I’m not even sure she’s aware of.
“Bye Nat!” I don’t think she catches the weird desperation that I hear in my own voice.
She turns and smiles at me, and a big part of me feels like I’m home again for good. As soon as she walks out of the door, my stomach clenches again. Or is it something lower, something in my pelvis? The pain hits hard, and I almost fall to my knees. It feels like the top half of my body is trying to separate from my bottom half, and I wish Natalie were still here. With her encyclopedic knowledge of all things medical, she’d know what to do, what to say. I walk over to the door, my lower back throbbing, and peek my head around the corner. Natalie is nowhere to be seen, so I take a deep breath and put on my scrubs.
There’s nothing wrong. There’s nothing wrong. I keep repeating it in my head.
The cramping and pulsing continues as I walk down the hall, then a hard cramp zaps through my center, followed by a hot rush of fluid. Even before I look, I know that it’s blood, hot, sticky, coppery, full of iron and terror.
“For one day. For one day, I was okay. Goddammit—” I mutter to myself, walking toward the lab. In the seconds it takes to get to there, it feels like the only thing I want in the world is this child, this life, the untenable hope that things might be okay. It’s a hope that I can’t navigate, one I can’t really have. A bright plume of blood hits my scrubs, and I start sobbing at the door of the lab.
“Can someone—I need someone to get me an ultrasound—”
At the same moment, both Priya and Zelda walk into the lab. Zelda drops the files she’s carrying and Priya grabs me by the arm firmly and takes me down to one of the private rooms. She looks at me, and I think she’s going to say something like, “What is this now?” But instead, she just nods to Zelda and places a hospital gown on my lap. The pain eases enough for me to strip out of my bloody pants as Priya draws the curtain and Zelda runs through the door. Before she pulls the curtain back, I text Ash.
Get to the hospital, now. I need you.
I stare at the screen while Zelda takes my vitals and Priya looks through my chart. To her credit, she maintains complete professionalism and doesn’t even look up as she takes down my information. “Female, twenty-eight, five and a half weeks pregnant, presenting with abdominal pain,” she mutters to herself, just like she’s in a room full of residents.
“HCG was 2000 on Monday, and 4500 on the nose today,” Zelda says as she wraps my arm in a blood pressure cuff. “Patient’s ultrasound showed a healthy pregnancy yesterday,” Zelda says, patting my hand. “And there’s no reason to believe it’s any different today.”
“Certainly not.” Priya looks up, and to my surprise, she smiles. “We’re just making sure,” she says softly. There are voices outside the door, and I might be hallucinating, but one of them sounds like Ash.
“My wife—” I hear him say, and there’s a tall shadow moving outside of the translucent window.
The door opens, and I see Debbie peaking her head around the corner. “Your friend is here. Says he’s your husband.” Debbie raises her eyebrow and looks at me meaningfully. Tears sting my eyes. This isn’t exactly what I had planned when I thought about revealing the secrets that I thought weighed me down. Life often doesn’t give you what you expect, however.
“Send him in,” I say, lying with my feet hanging off the edge of the table, covered only in my scrub shirt and a hospital gown draped over my lap. Zelda begins to set up the ultrasound machine, and Priya’s eyes go wide when Ash walks in. It wasn’t a decision to contact Ash. It was more like instinct. With the anxiety, the pain, the horror rising in my body, I reached out to the one person who made me feel truly safe.
“What’s wrong, Sunshine?” He comes and kneels next to me, taking my hand and holding it, his touch firm and reassuring.
There’s no more tucking these memories away, no more denial or separation, only him and me no matter what our history.
“I’m—I was—” Tears roll down from my eyes, pain dredging up from the past as Zelda brings the ultrasound machine around to the front of the bed.
“Best just to take a look,” she says, eyeing Ash. He grips my hand, and Zelda puts on gloves and nods to me. “Here we go, Dr. Collington.”
The touch of gel against my skin shocks me into reality, and Zelda moves the wand right to the spot where she saw the sac yesterday. There’s a click, and the sound turns on in the room. “See there?” she says. “Nothing to worry about in the slightest. Well, there’s a little subchorionic hematoma. But you can take a few days off, and you’ll be fine. It’s a little one.”
Ash’s jaw drops, and he looks at me, his brows knitted together, eyes questioning. The sound of the tiny, flickering heartbeat ticks on inside the room. There are no arms or legs, and the picture looks eerily alien, a tiny life glowing on a screen, causing all this trouble inside of me. Ash grips my hand so tight it feels like it might fall off, and then he smiles.
“That’s our—you’re—is it?” He stumbles over his words, sounding more like me than himself. We hadn’t ever talked about this—it was never a part of the plan for us. But here we are, together in a cold hospital room, looking at our future child on a screen, together, our lives intertwined and finally—almost—resolved. There’s the small issue of money, and the fact that Ash had the idea to declare bankruptcy and move back to New York.
But with the way he’s holding my hand, I’m sure he’s not going anywhere right now. He’ll be here, by my side, even if everything goes south. There’s more than just a marriage certificate connecting us, and there always has been, ever since that night we went home together.