My mother announced at my baby shower that only my sister’s future child deserved to be her grandchild — then she struck me in front of everyone, while my sister barely hid her smile.

Part 2

Calista finally said, "Mom didn’t mean to—"

Lenora turned on her so sharply that my sister stopped mid-sentence.

"Do not finish that," Lenora said.

The sirens arrived faster than I expected. Maybe time had folded in on itself. Maybe I had missed minutes while staring at that little silver bracelet under the table. The paramedics came in with their calm voices, their dark uniforms, their equipment bags bumping softly against the doorframe.

One of them asked me how far along I was.

"Twenty-seven weeks," I whispered.

"Any bleeding?"

"I don’t know."

My throat closed on the words.

Lenora held my hand while they lifted me onto the stretcher. As they rolled me toward the front door, my eyes caught the nursery gifts stacked against the wall: boxes of diapers, a baby monitor, a blue blanket folded like a cloud. I had spent weeks telling myself that this baby shower would be different. That my mother would behave. That she would finally see me not as the daughter who came second, but as a mother about to bring new life into the family.

At the doorway, I saw my mother standing on the porch with Della beside her. Her face had gone pale, but not soft. Calista hovered behind her, one hand still on her stomach.

"She’s making it look worse than it is," my mother said.

The paramedic stopped pushing for half a second.

Lenora leaned close to my ear, her voice low and trembling with rage.

"Remember she said that."

The ambulance doors closed. The siren began. And as my house disappeared through the back window, one thought repeated so hard inside my skull that it drowned out everything else.

Please be alive. Please be alive. Please be alive.

Then my phone buzzed beside me, and Lenora picked it up.

Her face changed before she showed me the screen.

It was a text from Calista.

"Don’t turn this into a police thing. You know what stress does to Mom."

Hospitals make time feel cruel.

One minute stretches long enough to hold every mistake you ever made. Every beep becomes a warning. Every nurse’s expression becomes a code you are desperate to read but terrified to understand. The fluorescent lights above me were too white, the blanket tucked around my shoulders too warm, and the gel on my belly cold enough to make me flinch.

"Try to breathe normally," the nurse said.

I almost laughed.

Normal had been knocked out of me somewhere between the gift table and the front porch.

Lenora stood near the wall, arms crossed tightly over her chest. She had glitter from the baby shower decorations stuck to one sleeve of her navy sweater, and her hair had fallen out of its clip in loose brown waves. She looked like she had run through a storm, though outside the hospital windows the sky was a clean, ordinary blue.

A young doctor named Dr. Imogen Rhee pulled a rolling stool beside me. She was careful with her words. That scared me more than panic would have.

"We’re going to monitor the baby closely," she said. "Right now, I need you to tell me exactly where you were hit."

I closed my eyes.