13. Serena
SERENA
The pain starts while I’m arguing with Lucia about soup.
Which feels rude. If my body’s going to scare me half to death, it could at least pick a dramatic setting. Something with production value.
Instead, I’m standing in my sister’s kitchen, holding a chipped bowl, telling her for the third time that soup doesn’t become a complete personality just because she adds barley.
Then something tightens low in my belly. Hard. Sharp. Wrong. The bowl slips in my hand.
Matteo catches it before it hits the floor. Of course he does. The man catches dishes now. This is where we are as a society.
“Serena,” Lucia says.
I put one hand on the counter.
“I’m fine.”
Nobody believes that. Not even me.
The pain comes again. Not huge. Not movie-labor huge. I’m four months pregnant, not starring in a birth scene with excellent lighting.
But it’s enough to fold my breath in half. Enough that my hand flies to my stomach like palms are a promise. Like I can hold the baby in place from the outside.
Not again. Please. Not this one too.
Matteo’s beside me instantly. Not touching. Close enough.
“Sit,” he says.
“I don’t want?—”
“Sit.”
That one is an order.
Another cramp rolls through me, and I sit because my knees make the decision before pride can file a complaint.
Lucia drops to a crouch in front of me. Her face is pale.
My sister doesn’t do pale. She does furious, tired, and mildly homicidal. Pale is new.
I hate it.
“Talk to me,” she says.
“Cramp. Bad enough that I’m not making a joke about your soup.”
“You made one thirty seconds ago.”
“That was before my uterus tried to unionize.”
Her mouth trembles. Not a smile. Almost fear.
Matteo is already moving. Phone out. Coat in hand.
“Private clinic first or hospital?”
Lucia doesn’t hesitate. “Hospital.”
“No.”
Both of them turn to me.
“No hospital,” I say.
“Are you insane?”
“Probably, but unrelated.”
“Serena.”
“If we go to a hospital, Rocco will find out.”
The room goes quiet. The real fear under the physical one.
I can handle pain. I can handle embarrassment. I don’t know if I can handle Rocco in a hospital, where everything gets too honest and people ask next-of-kin questions like the answer is simple.
Husband. Not husband. Emergency contact. Not safe.
Matteo crouches in front of me. His voice is calm. Too calm. That scares me more.
“You are going to the hospital.”
“I said no.”
“I heard the no.” His voice doesn’t change. “I mean the other part. The part where your fear of Rocco became bigger than the baby.”
That shuts me up. Completely. Brutal.
Lucia points at him. “I hate that I agree with you.”
He doesn’t look away from me. “You can hate me later,” he says. “In the car.”
Then the pain comes again, lower this time, meaner. I gasp.
Matteo’s hand lifts, palm open. “May I help you up?”
There is a cramp in my stomach, fear in my throat, and that question is what nearly makes me cry.
May I.
I nod.
He helps me stand. One hand at my elbow. One at my back. Careful. Practical. Not claiming anything. I hate that simple care keeps feeling like a plot twist.
Lucia grabs my bag, my cardigan, the scan envelope from the table, and an entire pack of crackers, because apparently every crisis needs snacks.
We make it down the stairs slowly. Every step feels like bargaining with God. Please be fine. Please be nothing. Please.
Matteo has a car at the curb. Something gray and boring, the kind of car nobody remembers unless it runs over their foot. Clean plates, nothing that ties back to a name. I get in the back with Lucia. Matteo drives. Fast. Not reckless.
Lucia grips my hand hard enough to fuse our bones. Her eyes fill.
Oh no. We’re not doing crying Lucia. That’s illegal in at least six countries.
“Don’t,” I say. “Your face is.”
I look down. No blood. I checked in the bathroom before we left. Twice. That should make me feel better. It doesn’t make me feel better enough.
The baby has been quiet since the pain started. I know that can be normal. Knowing things is useless when panic has a megaphone.
“Call the hospital,” Matteo says from the front.
Lucia already has the phone to her ear. She gives my name. My age. How far along. Pain. No bleeding. Yes, coming now.
Then she goes quiet. Too quiet.
I turn my head. “What are you doing?”
She doesn’t look at me. “Nothing.”
“Who are you texting?”
She locks her phone.
My heart drops. “No.”
“Serena—”
“No. Tell me you didn’t.”
Her mouth tightens. “He needs to know.”
The car goes very silent. Even Matteo says nothing.
“You called Rocco?”
“Texted.”
“Lucia.”
“You’re pregnant with his child and going to the hospital.”
“After what he did, you think I don’t know that?”
“I think if something goes wrong and he finds out after, you’ll never forgive me.”
That lands. Hard. Because she’s right. I’d be furious. I’d also be furious that she told him. I’m a balanced woman. I can be unreasonable in both directions.
“I hate you,” I whisper.
Lucia’s eyes shine. “I know.”
“I don’t mean it.”
“I know that too.”
Matteo turns at a light that isn’t exactly green.
“That was orange,” Lucia snaps.
“It had ambitions.”
I laugh once, then the laugh turns into a hiss because another cramp pulls low and tight.
I do not ask if Rocco has answered. I do not want to know. I want to know so badly my teeth ache.
The hospital is all glass, white lights, and people moving with purpose. Matteo pulls into the private drop-off and is out of the car before I can unbuckle. Lucia is already yelling at a nurse. Not mean-yelling. Efficient-yelling.
“Four months pregnant, abdominal pain, no bleeding, high stress, previous early loss,” Lucia says.
The nurse’s face changes at previous early loss. Mine does too.
I don’t talk about that loss often. Rocco and I barely talked about it at all. He held me. He slept beside me. But he didn’t know how to talk about the empty place. Neither did I. So we made it quiet.
Quiet isn’t the same as healed. Apparently my body kept receipts.
The nurse brings a wheelchair. I hate it. I sit anyway.
“Partner?” the nurse asks, looking between them.
“Sister,” Lucia says.
“Friend,” I say, before anyone can ask about Matteo.
Matteo doesn’t react. Good man. Annoying.
We get through a private intake room in a blur. Blood pressure cuff. Temperature. Pain scale. I say six. Lucia tells the nurse eight, because I called her soup barley propaganda and then turned gray. The nurse writes something down. Traitor.
They put me in a small room with a bed, a monitor, and a curtain that looks like it has survived several family tragedies and one toddler with jam.
Matteo stays by the door. Lucia stays by my head.
Then the hallway changes before I hear him. Which is ridiculous. Rocco isn’t weather. He’s a man who can apparently change the air pressure in a hospital corridor. Voices sharpen outside. Footsteps. More than one set.
Matteo straightens. Lucia mutters, “Oh, for God’s sake.”
The door opens.
Rocco arrives like a threat in a wet black coat.
Not alone, of course. Two men behind him—soldiers, not drivers, the kind who stand where they can see the exits—and a man in a suit with a badge clipped to his jacket.
Rocco finds me on the bed, and the boss drops. Falls right off his face. What’s left is my husband. Terrified. Barely breathing. Then the boss snaps back into place.
“Who is the attending?” Rocco asks.
The badge man says, “Mr. Castellano, we have?—”
“I asked for the attending.”
His voice is low. Not loud. Worse. People move when Rocco uses that voice—the one that sends orders down a chain and expects them kept. The nurse beside my bed goes stiff.
I hate that he has brought this into the room where my baby is being checked.
“Rocco,” I say.
He doesn’t hear me. Or he hears me and can’t stop yet.
“I want obstetrics here now. Private room cleared. Security on this floor. No visitors without my approval. And I want?—”
“Stop.”
He stops talking. Everyone stops moving. I didn’t yell. I don’t have the breath. But my voice cuts through the room anyway.
There is so much fear in his face that for one stupid second I want to comfort him. My whole life is hating things I still want.
“Not like this,” I say.
His throat moves. “Serena.”
“No.”
I push myself higher on the bed.
“You do not get to storm in here and make everyone afraid because you are afraid.”
The words hit him. I see them hit.
“I’m trying to help,” Rocco says.
“I know.”
That hurts him more.
“That’s the problem. You think helping means taking over.”
Rocco takes in the monitor leads on the tray. My stomach. My face. He looks like a man being asked to put down a weapon while the house burns.
“Tell me what you need,” he says.
The room goes still again. That question doesn’t belong to the old version of him. Tell me what you need. Not I know what you need.
My eyes burn. Great. We’re doing that again.
“I need you to wait outside.”
Rocco goes white. Not pale. White.
“Serena.”
“Outside.”
His hand flexes once. He looks at the bed like leaving me on it is physical pain.
“Please,” I say, and I hate how small it sounds.
That does it. Not the nurse. Not Matteo. Not Lucia. Me.
Rocco steps back. One step. Then another.
He turns to the badge man. “Everyone outside.”
“Mr. Castellano?—”
One look from Rocco. The man shuts up and leaves. The two guards leave too.
Rocco is last. At the door, he stops on me again.
“If you need me?—”
“I know where the door is.”
His mouth tightens like he deserves that. He does.
Then he leaves. The whole room exhales.
Lucia says, “Well. That was almost a hostage situation with better shoes.”
I laugh. Then I cry. Just a little. Very efficient.
The nurse, whose name is Claire, bless her calm face, asks if I want my sister and my friend to stay. Matteo is still at the door. Still as stone. But his eyes are on me. Not on the hallway where Rocco waits.
“Yes,” I say.
Matteo blinks once. Then nods.
They take blood. A doctor comes in, not the one Rocco demanded but a woman named Dr. Ross with silver hair, kind eyes, and the energy of someone who once told a cabinet minister to sit down and be quiet. I love her immediately.