Chapter 7
The first thing that came back was the cold.
I was lying on the floor of the hall, in my own blood, and from the phone by my face came a far-off voice, as if from underwater: "Stay on the line, the unit's on its way.
" I didn't remember dialing—but they had the address: I'd given it myself that evening. For her.
Behind the wall, Dominic slept. Ten steps away, behind a closed door—and he didn't come. I didn't call for him either: I knew he wouldn't get up.
After that—in fragments. Pounding at the door. Many hands in blue sleeves. A flashlight in my eyes.
"How far along? How long have you been bleeding? Can you hear me?"
"Thirty-three," I forced out. "Save the baby. Just the baby."
"Both of you—you and the baby. Don't check out on me, look at me."
They carried me, everything swaying, then—the tight interior of the ambulance, a lamp right in my face, a needle in the crook of my elbow. Someone pressed a cold sensor to my belly and went still, listening. That waiting stretched into a whole eternity.
"There it is. There's a heartbeat," he said to someone.
And that short there it is I carried with me into the dark—as the one thing left to hold on to.
And then there was a white ceiling and the cottony hospital quiet that made my ears ring.
"You're awake? Lie still, lie still. You're in the hospital, it's all behind you now." A stranger's face bent over me; an IV line ran to my arm.
My palm flew to my belly on its own. It was there—taut, round, mine. But inside stood a silence, and that silence squeezed my throat harder than any pain.
"The baby..." I rasped, my mouth dry as an oven. "Where's my baby?"
"Your baby's right where it should be. The doctor will come and tell you everything. Don't thrash around."
The doctor didn't come right away—not young, with a tired, unreadable face, and she sat down on the edge of a chair like she had a hard night behind her.
"You lost a great deal of blood," she said evenly. "There was an abruption, hemorrhaging started. Another half hour and we'd be having a different conversation. Or none at all."
"And the baby?" I clutched at the sheet. "Just tell me about the baby. Alive?"
"Alive." She finally looked up. "Heartbeat's steady, the abruption's small, we stopped the bleeding. The pregnancy is holding."
I closed my eyes and, for the first time all that night, breathed out—all the way down.
"But it's too soon to celebrate." She didn't give me a second.
"It's all hanging by a thread. You're bleeding not from any illness—from shock, from your nerves.
You need complete rest: lie down, don't lift anything heavy, don't cry, don't fight.
One more shock like this and it starts all over again, and the second time we may not make it. Do you hear me? No stress."
"I hear you," I said.
"And one more thing." She paused in the doorway. "Whoever drove you to this—it's not my business, I'm not the police. But if it happens again, next time I won't only be talking to you. Think about it."
I didn't answer. What is there to say? That "drove me to this" is putting it mildly? That he'd slept behind a wall while I called into the phone—not for him, but for an indifferent stranger's voice?
I didn't yet know that my "no stress" would last exactly until the threshold of my own building.
In the room it was just the two of us—me and the empty chair by the wall, where the one who waits with you is supposed to sit.
No one sat there. No jacket on the back, no water on the nightstand—nothing to say that anyone had been frightened for me.
They'd carried me out of his house on a stretcher, past his bedroom—and he'd slept.
By morning they brought me back my bag of things. The phone came alive and rang at once, as if it had been lying in wait. "Dominic."
I stared at the name until I made up my mind. I raised it to my ear, said nothing.
"Where are you?" A hoarse, hungover voice. Not "how are you," not "what happened." "I wake up—you're gone, and the hall's a slaughterhouse. What did you pull this time? Mom's stuck with the kids, I'm carrying everyone alone, huh?"
I was silent. Listening—and I couldn't believe this voice had once been dear to me.
"The whole floor's soaked, who's supposed to scrub that?" he went on, not a single note of worry, only irritation. "Leah! Are you deaf? How long are you planning to lie around there?"
"At the hospital," I said at last. Evenly, no tears.
A short pause. And—fool that I was—I still waited for one word about the baby.
"I see. Having yourself a nice time." He grunted. "Well, lie there, since you've lain down."
I hung up. Blocked the number—and for the first time in ages, I did it without guilt. Only emptiness and a cold, clear relief.
He hadn't even asked whether the baby was alive. To him it simply didn't exist. And, looking at the dark screen, I understood: he didn't exist for me anymore either.
A minute later the phone rang again—my mother-in-law. I wanted to let it go, but I thought of the kids and picked up.
"Leah." Her voice dry as a stick. "What's happened over there now? Dominic's not himself."
"And did he tell you what exactly happened?"
"He told me you threw a fit and drove yourself to the hospital.
You're always driving things." A pause. "The kids are with me, fed, put to bed, don't you worry about that at least. But this can't go on.
A man needs peace in his home, not these scenes of yours.
Be patient, if you want to keep your family. "
"And if I don't?" I asked quietly.
She choked on the other end, as if I'd said something obscene.
"You fool," she got out at last. "Where would you go, with three of them." And she hung up.
Where would you go. A month ago that question held me tighter than any lock. Now it sounded almost funny.
The one number worth dialing, I dialed myself.
"Leah? God, why are you calling in the middle of the night, what happened?" Carol picked up at once.
It burst out of me—I couldn't get a single coherent word out, only sobs, only "Carol, Carol."
"Okay. Breathe. Where are you, which hospital?" Her voice went hard, collected, without a trace of panic—the way no one had spoken to me in years. "Once you're out—I'm coming for you myself. And none of this 'I'll manage,' you hear me?"
"The baby's alive," I managed. "They saved it."
"Then we're going to take care of it. You, me, and it. And that man is never going to be near you again."
"He won't allow it," I whispered. "He won't just let go."
"No one's going to ask him," Carol snapped.
Three days later they discharged me—wrung out to the very bottom, running on one thought: get home and lie down.
Just lie in my own bed and, for one hour, think about nothing.
Carol wanted me at her place, but I shook my head—I needed to go home, to my own walls, to the kids' things, to the little that was still mine.
"At least let me walk you to the door," she said, pulling up outside the building. "You can barely stand."
"I'll manage. It's two steps." I wanted to walk into my own home on my own feet, not on someone's arm. The last foolish scrap of pride I had left.
I climbed out of the car toward evening, holding on to everything I passed. All I wanted was quiet and a pillow.
I open the door to the entryway—and I see him.
Dominic stood there, a girl pinned to the wall—young, twenty at most, no older.
And definitely not the one who, not long ago, had carried his "son" out in front of her.
A new one. He was kissing her greedily, hurriedly, one hand in her hair, the other sliding under her jacket—kissing her the way teenagers do in a stairwell when there's nowhere else to go. She giggled into his mouth.
Three days. Three days had passed since the night I'd nearly bled to death on the floor of my own hall—and by some miracle kept my little girl. The one who'd come to my house hadn't kept her child and was still in the hospital. And he was already pawing the next one in a stairwell.
"Dom," I said. Quietly. It just slipped out, from old habit.
He turned. Without shame, without alarm—only annoyance, like I'd interrupted something.
"Oh. They let you out." He didn't even take his hand off her waist. "What are you doing here? You're supposed to be on bed rest."
"Who is this?" My voice didn't shake, and I surprised myself with it.
"What's it to you?" He smirked. The girl finally glanced at me, at my belly, and figured out to peel herself off the wall.
"Dom, who even is she?" she piped up, looking from him to me. "You said you lived alone."
"I do live alone," he answered without a blink. "That's just... an ex."
An ex. Twelve years, two kids, a whole house—all of it fit for him into one word, tossed off between kisses to some stranger.
"Did you even ask," I said, "whether the baby's alive? The one I nearly bled out over that night—when you beat me, pregnant?"
He blinked. For a second something crossed his face—not conscience, no, but calculation: had he let something slip in front of the new one?
"I never laid a finger on anyone," he said quickly, cutting a glance at the girl. "She'll tell you all kinds of things. No witnesses. Don't even start with that."
The girl backed off another step. Something was starting to get through to her—not all of it, but something.
"A pregnant woman?..." she echoed quietly. "You hit a pregnant woman?"
"Don't listen to her, she's cracked," he said, and reached to pull the girl back by the arm, but she was already backing toward the door. "Would you—hold on! Where?"
The door banged shut behind her. Dominic swore after her, spun toward me—and his face wasn't guilty, it was furious.
"Happy now?" he spat. "Scared her off. That's your gift: ruining things."
And that was the last thing I ever wanted to hear from him. Not "I'm sorry." Not "how is the baby." But no witnesses.
And right there—not in the hospital, not on the bloodied floor, but here, in that cheap yellow light, under a stranger's giggle—something in me clicked and settled into place. For good.
I didn't say another word to him. I turned—slowly, so nothing would cry out inside me, so I wouldn't jostle loose the last thing still holding—and walked back to the car.
"Well? What happened?" Carol saw my face and understood without a word. "That piece of—"
"The documents tomorrow, first thing, before he's up." I sank into the seat and laid a hand on my belly. "For now just get me out of here. Anywhere."
"I've got somewhere," she said, pulling out of the lot. "You'll stay with me as long as you need. There's a room, I'll fold out the couch. And in the morning we'll go for the papers together—I'm not letting you set foot in there alone again."
"It's not just the papers I need," I said, looking out the window. "Money. I never put a cent aside: everything was 'ours,' meaning his. I'm leaving with nothing. With two kids and this belly."
"Not with nothing," Carol corrected. "With me. That's already not zero."
"Tomorrow we get the papers: the kids' birth certificates, your license," Carol counted off on her fingers, right there on the wheel. "Then—divorce, all by the book, so he can't dig at it. Just don't you dare pity him. Not once."
"I won't," I said. And for the first time, I think, in all of it, I wasn't lying.
I was quiet, watching other people's warm windows drift by out the glass.
Somewhere behind one of them, at my mother-in-law's, Noah and Mia were asleep—and tomorrow they'd be told Mama was "under the weather.
" Let it be that, for now. I'd come for them—but not to that house, and not as the woman who'd crawled out of it in her own blood. A different one.
The car pulled away. I watched the yellow light of the entryway drift off in the mirror, and for the first time I felt neither pain nor jealousy—only a level, cold calculation. I had to hold on. Carry her to term. And leave so cleanly that afterward he'd never find us—not me, not the kids, no one.
The doctor had told me to avoid upheaval. I smirked into the dark of the car: the biggest upheaval had already happened—I'd finally seen him for what he'd always been. And, watching the lights slide away out the window, I caught myself on one quiet, astonished thought.
How could I ever have fallen in love with a man like that?