Chapter 2

The emergency track still needed a few minutes for approvals and pre-op prep.

But a few minutes was exactly what I didn't have.

The monitor shrieked.

The doctor's face changed all at once.

"Fetal heart rate down to sixty!"

A nurse rushed out and shoved a pen into Evan's hand.

"Sign it! Sign now!"

Evan finally looked up. His lips moved.

"If we do a C-section now, how much will the hospital stay after cost?"

Tears sprang to the nurse's eyes.

"Your wife is dying!"

The shout made Evan knit his brows.

Charlotte tugged lightly at the hem of his shirt.

"Evan, don't let your emotions run away with you."

"Some doctors just like to scare the family with the worst-case scenario."

I lay on the delivery bed, in too much pain to laugh, too much to cry.

So it turned out my life and my baby's couldn't hold anyone hostage.

The next second, the doctor pushed the nurse aside.

"Start the hospital's emergency resuscitation protocol. Surgery first!"

But Evan grabbed the bed rail.

"I didn't sign. Who gave you permission to touch her?"

"If something goes wrong, who's responsible?"

The doctor snapped back.

"You blocking it now is what's really going to make something go wrong!"

I watched them grapple.

Watched a nurse run to call security.

Watched, too, as my own body grew lighter and lighter.

The baby moved inside me one last time.

Very faintly.

Like a goodbye.

Right before my mind scattered completely, I heard Evan give a cold laugh.

"You still haven't explained that three dollars!"

I sat up from the delivery bed.

Looked down and saw blood soaked all through the sheets.

Saw, too, the other me, eyes closed, not moving at all.

Inside the delivery room and out, everything had turned to chaos.

"Cardiac arrest in the mother!"

"Epinephrine!"

"Notify neonatal, have them ready!"

When Evan heard those two words, cardiac arrest, a flicker of panic finally crossed his eyes.

He stopped a nurse.

"What's going on."

The head nurse had had enough.

"Your wife has had abdominal pain and bleeding since eleven o'clock last night. Why are you only bringing her in now?"

Evan said flatly.

"She didn't say she was bleeding."

Charlotte jumped in at once.

"She texted me last night. Said her belly felt a little tight."

"From how she described it, it sounded like false labor, so I told her to rest first."

The doctor's head whipped toward her.

"Where's her high-risk prenatal flag?"

Charlotte's face froze.

"What high-risk flag?"

The doctor flipped through the chart, voice going colder by the word.

"Three weeks ago the ultrasound flagged an abnormal placenta position and recommended admission for observation."

"How did that turn into rest at home in the system?"

Charlotte's fingertips curled.

"It might be a data-entry error."

I hovered at her side and saw her phone screen light up clear as day.

She had just messaged someone saved as "Contractor, Lisa":

【Delete Louise Sullivan's high-risk acknowledgment. Now.】

The reply came back:

【Too late. The hospital system logs everything automatically.】

The color drained clean out of Charlotte's face.

So three weeks ago, my pain hadn't been imaginary.

That day I'd held the report and asked her why my belly always felt so heavy and dragging.

She'd smiled and said:

"It's like that in the third trimester."

"Admission runs a few hundred a day. You have to think about the family too."

Evan had nodded beside her.

"Listen to Charlotte. Don't run to the hospital over every little thing."

"Hospitals are full of germs. It's not necessarily a good place to be."

That night I had a hospital bag packed and ready, and he sent it back too.

His reason: "The hospital has everything. Don't pay the idiot tax."

Now, at last, I knew.

There was no such thing as a difficult labor or bad luck.

They had simply sealed off every last road I had to survive, one by one, from the very start.