“Give me a second, Maya,” the doctor said, his voice tight.
I stared at the ceiling tile directly above me. It had a water stain shaped like a map of Florida. I focused on it. I poured every ounce of my will, every prayer I had ever learned, every bargain I could make with the universe into that water stain.
Take my job. Take my house. Take my leg. I don’t care. Just let that heart beat.
We had tried for four years. Four years of negative tests that looked like gravestones in the bathroom trash. Three rounds of IVF. The bruising on my stomach from the injections had only just faded before the baby bump started to show. We had mortgaged our future for this child. Elias had worked double shifts. I had taken on extra cases. She wasn’t just a pregnancy; she was our victory.
And a man with a Global Services status had tried to erase her because he was late for a meeting.
Womp-womp-womp-womp.
It was faint. It was fast—too fast—but it was there.
The galloping horse rhythm of a fetal heartbeat.
“There she is,” the doctor exhaled. The tension in the room snapped. “Heart rate is 170. Tachycardic, she’s stressed, but she’s there.”
I let out a sob that sounded like an animal dying. “She’s alive.”
“She is,” the doctor said, wiping the gel off. “But Maya, you have a placental abruption. The impact caused the placenta to partially detach from the uterine wall. That’s the bleeding. You’re losing blood, and she’s losing oxygen support.”
“What… what does that mean?”
“It means you are not going anywhere,” he said sternly. “We need to monitor you closely. If the separation gets worse, or if her heart rate drops, we have to do an emergency C-section immediately. You are on strict bed rest. Absolute stillness.”
“Okay,” I whispered. “Okay.”
“Is there someone we can call?”
“Elias,” I said. “My husband. He’s… he’s in the waiting room? Or he’s coming?”
“We’ll find him.”
An hour later, the door to my room burst open.
It wasn’t a gentle entrance. It was the entrance of a man who had terrified every security guard between the front door and the maternity ward.
Elias filled the doorway. My husband stands six-foot-four, with shoulders wide enough to block out the sun. He is a gentle man, a high school history teacher who knits tiny booties and cries at Pixar movies. But right now, standing in the doorway in his coat covered in melting snow, he looked like a storm god.
His eyes scanned the room, wild and frantic, until they landed on me.
“Maya.”
The air went out of him. He rushed to the bedside, his big hands hovering over me, afraid to touch, afraid to break me.
“I’m okay,” I lied. “I’m okay, Eli.”
“They said…” He choked up, his voice cracking. He grabbed the bed rail, his knuckles turning white. “The police called me. They said you were assaulted. They said some guy…”
He couldn’t finish the sentence. He looked at the monitor, at the squiggly green line tracing Aurora’s heartbeat.
“Is she…?”
“She’s holding on,” I said, reaching out to cover his hand with mine. My hand looked so small and dark against his pale, trembling skin. “We have to stay calm, Eli. She can feel our stress.”
He pulled up a chair and collapsed into it, burying his face in the mattress near my hip. I felt his shoulders shaking.
“I should have been there,” he muffled into the sheets. “I should have driven you. I knew the weather was bad. I knew O’Hare was a mess.”
“Stop,” I said firmly, running my fingers through his damp curls. “This isn’t on you. This isn’t on the weather. This is on one man. One man who decided his time was more valuable than our lives.”
Elias lifted his head. The grief in his eyes was replaced by a cold, hard flint.
“Who was he?”
“I don’t know his name,” I said. “Rich. Arrogant. First Class.”
“Is he in jail?”
“The airport police arrested him,” I said. “But…”
I hesitated. I knew how the system worked. I was a part of the system.
“But what?” Elias asked.
“He has money, Eli. Real money. And I’m just… I’m just a prosecutor. We make good money, but we don’t make private jet money. Men like him… they have lawyers on speed dial who play golf with the judges.”
Elias stood up. He walked to the window, looking out at the Chicago skyline, battered by the blizzard.
“He put his hands on you,” Elias said, his voice dangerously quiet. “He hurt my girls.”
“Eli.”
“I’m going to kill him.”
“Elias!” I snapped. “Look at me.”
He turned. His eyes were red-rimmed.
“We are going to destroy him,” I said, and the prosecutor in me rose up through the pain meds and the fear. “But we are going to do it my way. We are going to do it the right way. I am going to take everything from him. His status. His money. His freedom. I am going to make sure that every time he looks at an airplane for the rest of his life, he feels sick to his stomach.”
I took a deep breath, wincing as a cramp rolled through my abdomen.
“But right now, I need you here. I need you to be the father. I can’t be the fighter right now. I have to be the vessel. I have to keep her inside.”
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