Harper blinked her eyes open, but squinted against the fluorescence that shone in from the hallway. She felt the stiff, starched sheet over her and let out a small groan. The hospital. You’re in the hospital, she reminded herself. Fuck, that’s right. Sean would be pissed as hell, worried, or both by now and there was no way to get ahold of him.

She could feel drugs as they coursed through her system and could tell the fatigue she felt was enforced. Still, as she struggled to sit up and felt the pinch of IVs in her skin, she let out a gasp as she looked down her body. The otherwise bright white sheets were stained with a pool of blood that looked almost fake.

A scream built up in her throat. It sounded like an animal, but she couldn’t stop. A nurse in scrubs with a print of teddy bears burst into the room with a doctor on her heels. “Calm down,” the nurse repeated. “Calm down, we need to get the ultrasound set up to see what’s going on here.”

“The baby,” she screamed. “It’s the baby.”

The nurse prepped the machine that had been pushed into the corner of the room and pulled the soiled blanket and sheet off of Harper with a snap. Cold air rushed over her skin, and she realized her legs were covered in the congealed, sticky redness. When the nurse pushed up her gown and began to smear the jelly across her stomach, Harper was briefly embarrassed of the underwear she wore. The lace trim was worn out. “Always wear good, clean underwear in case you’re hospitalized,” her mother had always said.

The doctor took the little handheld element that looked like the scanners at department stores. He pressed firmly into her abdomen while he kept an eye on the screen. The same thing had happened when she was admitted, and Harper hadn’t been able to see much on the grainy screen then either.

“Is the baby okay?” she asked.

“Please keep still,” the nurse said. Her voice was kind but firm.

“Is the baby okay?” Harper asked again.

The doctor gave a slight shake of his head. “I can’t seem to find the fetus …”

Harper let out a cry that sounded even to her like prey that had been shot in the dark. Sean walked through the door, two coffee cups in hand along with a heavy paper bag of muffins. “What’s going on?” he asked. “Is everything okay?”

“No,” Harper choked out. “The baby … they can’t find the baby.”

“I’m sorry,” the doctor said. He looked briefly at Harper, then at Sean. “Sometimes these things happen.” He looked at his pager. “It was the first trimester, and that time can be quite delicate—”

“It was me,” Harper said. “I did it. Or didn’t,” she corrected. The tears had turned silent, a quiet faucet she couldn’t turn off. “The baby couldn’t stay because of me.”

“I’ll let Nurse Connie clean you up,” the doctor said. “And I’ll be back in a little while to discuss your options.”

“Options?”

“It was the first trimester and you lost quite a bit of blood, but it wasn’t a traditional miscarriage,” he said. “Most of the time, I recommend a D and C to ensure all the waste is purged from the body.”

Harper flinched at the word. Purged. She’d never be able to escape it. “No,” she said vehemently as she started to shake her head. “I’m not doing that. I want a second opinion. The baby was just here—”

“I’m sorry,” the nurse said as she squeezed Harper’s hand. “It’s gone.” Sean started to move toward her, but the nurse stopped him with a single look. “You can sit in the chair,” the nurse said, “out of the way.”

“You don’t know!” Harper screamed at the nurse, the doctor, Sean, all of them. “Try it again.”

“Honey, I’m sorry,” the nurse said. The doctor was silent, but made small scratches on the chart that hung from the foot of Harper’s bed.

“You’re sorry?” Harper asked. Hysteria mixed with a macabre laugh in her voice. “You’re sorry? What are you sorry for? What did you do?”

“You’re young,” the nurse said. “You can try again.”

“I wasn’t fucking trying the first time!” Harper said. “I don’t want another baby, I want this baby. You don’t fucking get it, it was my only chance—”

“Up the sedation,” the doctor said bluntly.

“What? No!” Harper said. “You can’t just knock me out—”

But it was too late. Her own weakness surprised her. As Harper raised her hand to keep the nurse away from the IVs, the nurse easily pinned her arm down. She couldn’t do anything but watch as the fluids flooded her body faster. The faux sense of calm and exhaustion moved through her body like an electric blanket.

“Harper, stop,” she heard Sean say. Stop what? “It’s okay, just rest.”

Rest. She was tired of being told to rest, to calm down, that everything was okay. Everything is clearly not fucking okay, she tried to say, but the words just echoed in the empty chamber of her head.

She felt familiar arms around her shoulders and breathed Sean in. His body eclipsed the painful bright light above her. Harper tried to fight off the drugs, but they were too strong. She heard nurses murmuring and smelled fresh sheets. Someone, somehow, had already cleaned off her legs. She pressed her thighs together like she always did in bed, aware that the thigh gap had disappeared as the hard mattress pushed against her flesh.

I’m sorry. I fucked up. I fucked everything up. The words didn’t come out, but she prayed that Sean could still hear them. Even as the blackness crept closer around her, she scanned her body and realized something was missing. There was an emptiness, a space, that was spooned out from her center. How can you miss someone who’d only been a whisper inside you?

She’d been wrong for all those days. Maybe there hadn’t been any kicks or swells of the stomach, but the baby had been there. She’d known him, through and through. Him, she thought to herself. I didn’t realize that until now.

Harper felt a bustling of busy nurses around her. They worked around Sean, too. The steadiness of his arms kept her from drifting away into the wild unknown. The smell of bleach filled the air, and she felt gentle sponges across her skin.

“ … in time to make the softball game …” one of the nurses murmured. Harper would have laughed if she could at the idiocy of it all. Here they were, changing out her bloody sheets with bits of her baby on them as they talked about finishing a shift in time to go to a game.

Probably one of their kids’ games, she thought and it hit her. Her child was gone. Her only child. No matter what any of them said, no matter what Sean would say when the drugs wore off, she wouldn’t “try” again. The first had been the only, and he’d been a miracle. And she’d ruined it all, and for what? So she wouldn’t get fat.

“There’s a difference between fat and pregnant,” P had said. Obviously, right? But she hadn’t fully believed that. She’d watched friends expand into happy motherhood and had never understood how they could do that. Especially the models, the actresses, how they could just give up their whole body for a wiggling little pink thing. But now she knew. Why do I always have to figure everything out so late?

The walls were black velvet and closed in tighter. “I love you,” Sean whispered into her ear. He just kept repeating it. She tried to open her mouth to tell him again how sorry she was, how she loved him, too. But no matter how much she tried, nothing came out.

She wanted to tell him that she understood now. Just give me another chance, a do-over, and I’ll get it right. She would eat right, exercise in moderation, rest and do everything else she was supposed to. She’d no longer obsess over getting just the right supplements, but go with her gut and just start it already. Anything it took, she would do.

The doctor could be wrong, she tried to tell herself, but she knew that was a lie. She’d been asleep when the baby had slipped away, and she hadn’t even noticed. Harper would never forget the shock of those red sheets. So bright and cheery, it had been so wrong. Where had everyone been? she thought. She remembered Sean with those white paper cups and the little brown paper bag that seeped out oil from the café.

The baby had known. He’d waited until it was just the two of them to make his escape. And Harper hadn’t been able to stop him, to keep him. Even on her back, with her thighs spread thick, she hadn’t been able to clamp her legs shut tight enough to keep him safe. The thigh gap had done what it was supposed to do. It was an alley, a highway, that let the greatest thing that had ever happened to her make a getaway into the night.

“Does she have any other family?” she heard a nurse ask.

“Not really,” Sean said. He hesitated. Don’t call my mom. Don’t you let them call my mom.

“Parents?”

“Uh, not really,” Sean said. She was aware of her phone, dead in her purse, but all it would take was a slight recharge for anyone to scroll through it to find her mother’s number.

“Okay,” the nurse said. “Just checking.”

Harper sighed internally, slightly comforted, and let the dark take her.