A tall man with a blue surgical cap leaned over my face. He smelled strongly of black coffee and peppermint gum.
“Maya, I’m the anesthesiologist,” he said rapidly, his voice calm amidst the screaming chaos. “Your baby is in severe distress. We have to put you under completely to get him out right now. I need you to count backward from ten.”
He swapped my clear plastic oxygen mask for a heavy, black rubber one. It smelled like harsh plastic and sweet gas.
“Wait,” I panicked, trying to lift my head off the flat pillow. “My leg. The poison.”
“We will handle it, Maya,” the man said gently, pressing the mask firmly over my nose and mouth. “Count for me. Ten.”
I looked past his shoulder. I found Sarah standing near the wall.
Her blue scrubs were covered in my blood. Her face was pale, and she was shaking slightly now that the immediate running was over. But she was watching me. She was standing guard.
“Nine,” I whispered into the rubber mask.
My eyelids suddenly felt like they were made of lead. The blinding surgical lights above me began to blur into long, white streaks.
“Save him,” I thought I said out loud, but I couldn’t hear my own voice anymore.
The burning agony in my leg slowly faded into a cold, heavy numbness. The terrifying flatline tone of the fetal monitor drifted away, replaced by the sound of rushing water in my ears.
Darkness swallowed me completely.
It was the smell that woke me up first.
It wasn’t the sickening stench of battery acid and decaying blood. It was the sharp, clean scent of bleach and sterile cotton.
I tried to open my eyes. My eyelids felt crusted and heavy.
When I finally managed to pry them open, the light was dim. I was in a small, private hospital room. The blinds were drawn closed over the window, letting in only a faint slice of orange street light.
There was a rhythmic, steady beeping next to my head. My own heart monitor.
I tried to move my legs.
My right leg shifted slightly under the thin white sheet. My left leg didn’t move at all. It felt like a massive block of concrete, completely numb and heavy, wrapped tightly in something thick and rigid.
Then, the true terror hit me.
My stomach.
I reached my hands down, my fingers trembling violently. I touched my abdomen under the hospital blanket.
It was empty.
The heavy, swollen tightness of my thirty-four-week pregnancy was gone. My stomach was soft, wrapped in a thick layer of tight surgical gauze.
The room was completely silent. There was no plastic bassinet. There was no baby crying.
“My baby,” I choked out. My throat was so dry it felt like it was tearing.
A shadow moved in the corner of the room.
I flinched, my heart rate instantly spiking on the monitor next to me. The memory of Helen standing in the dark corner of the clinic room washed over me, making my chest tighten in absolute panic.
But it wasn’t Helen.
A woman stepped forward into the dim light. She looked to be in her forties, wearing a cheap, wrinkled gray suit jacket and holding a small notepad. She had tired, dark circles under her eyes.
“Mrs. Vance?” the woman asked softly, her voice raspy.
She walked over to the edge of my bed. She didn’t reach out to touch me. She just stood there, looking down at me with an expression I couldn’t quite read. It looked like pity mixed with deep exhaustion.
“I’m Detective Ramirez,” she said, flipping her notepad closed and sliding it into her jacket pocket. “I’ve been waiting for you to wake up.”
“Where is my son?” I asked, my voice cracking, tears instantly flooding my vision. “Is he alive? Please.”
Detective Ramirez sighed heavily. She pulled a plastic visitor’s chair closer to the bed and sat down.
“Your son is in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit,” Ramirez said quietly. “He is very small, Maya. And he ingested some of the toxins through the placenta before they could deliver him. He is on a ventilator.”
I let out a shuddering, broken breath. He was alive. He was fighting.
“He’s alive,” I whispered, staring at the ceiling.
“He is,” Ramirez confirmed, though her voice didn’t sound celebratory. “The doctors are doing everything they can. You’ve been in a medically induced coma for two days while they cleaned the chemical burns out of your leg. You lost a lot of muscle tissue.”
Two days. I had been asleep for two days.
“Helen,” I said, the name tasting like ash in my mouth. “My mother-in-law. She put lye in my leg. She told me she wanted to force me into early labor.”
“We know,” the detective nodded slowly. “Helen is currently in police custody. She hasn’t asked for a lawyer. She actually hasn’t stopped talking since the security guards dragged her out of the clinic.”
Ramirez leaned forward, resting her elbows on her knees. She looked at me very carefully.
“Maya, I need to ask you some questions about your husband, Mark.”
The cold dread returned, pooling in the bottom of my empty stomach.
“He’s in London,” I said defensively, my voice small. “He went on a business trip. Helen told me he planned this. She told me he couldn’t be in the house when it happened. But she’s lying. Mark loves me.”
Detective Ramirez stared at me for a long, uncomfortable moment.
She looked down at the floor, then back up at my face. She looked genuinely sorry for what she was about to tell me.
“Maya,” Ramirez said gently, her voice dropping to a near whisper. “Mark didn’t go to London.”
I stared at her. The steady beep of the heart monitor seemed to slow down.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“We pulled the international flight manifests,” the detective explained, her eyes filled with dark sympathy. “Mark never boarded a plane. He never even went to the airport.”
“Then where is he?” I begged, my hands gripping the hospital sheet.
“We pulled Helen’s phone records from the clinic,” Ramirez continued, ignoring my question as she laid out the facts. “She made three calls on the day you fell in the basement. They were all to Mark’s cell phone.”
The detective stood up from the chair. She walked closer to the side of my bed.
“Maya, Mark has been staying at a cheap motel two miles from your house for the last three days,” Ramirez said softly. “He was just waiting for her to call and tell him it was over.”
