1. Stephanie #2
“I need help.” The words came out in gasps between sobs. “I’m bleeding. The baby. I called Kevin and he won’t answer. I called an ambulance but I’m scared and I don’t want to be alone.”
“I’m on my way. Stay on the phone with me, sweetheart. I’m coming.”
She stayed with me until the paramedics arrived. She talked me through breathing, through the fear, through the moment I looked down again and watched the red bloom wider through my sweatpants. She was still on the phone, her voice steady in my ear, when they lifted me onto the stretcher.
“I’ll meet you at the hospital,” she said. “I’m calling Becca. We’re coming, Stephanie. You’re not alone.”
But I was.
The ambulance ride blurred into fluorescent light and a young paramedic’s hand pressing on my stomach and questions I couldn’t hold onto. How far along? Twelve weeks. Any previous miscarriages? No, this was our first. Where’s the father? I don’t know. I don’t know.
At the hospital they wheeled me into a room, hooked me to machines, and a kind-faced doctor held my hand while she told me what I already knew.
“I’m so sorry, Mrs. Coleman. The pregnancy isn’t viable. We’re going to need to do a procedure to make sure everything is clear, but I need you to understand. The baby is gone.”
Alex. We were going to name them Alex. And now… They were gone.
When I surfaced from the haze of it the room was dim and my mouth was dry.
My hand moved across the mattress before I was fully awake, reaching for the warm weight of the man who’d slept beside me for ten years, and my fingers closed on the cold metal of the bed rail instead.
I kept my hand there, curled around the rail, because drawing it back would mean admitting he wasn’t coming.
Some slow sober part of me had already known that before I opened my eyes.
Tris arrived first, coming through the door with her silver hair sliding loose from its clip and her coat buttoned wrong, one lapel riding higher than the other. She took one look at me and her whole face gave way.
“Oh, my sweet girl.” She crossed to my bedside in three steps and gathered me in. “I’m here. I’m right here.”
“The baby,” I managed. “Tris, the baby is gone.”
“I know, honey. I know.”
My mother came next, then Harry. Kevin’s sister looked like she’d run the whole way from her apartment, still in yoga pants and sneakers, her dark hair loose and wild around her face.
She had Kevin’s eyes, that same pale blue, and for one raw second it hurt to look at her because it meant looking at the shape of him.
“Steph.” She grabbed my other hand. “God, Steph. I’m so sorry.”
The four of us stayed like that for a long time. Me in the bed, the three of them around it, while the machines beeped and the nurses came and went and my husband stayed unreachable somewhere across the island.
It was Harry who finally asked.
“Where’s Kevin?”
I closed my eyes. The tears had dried and left me hollow, scraped clean, nothing left inside to spill. “He had a dinner. An investor meeting for the clinic.”
“And he’s not answering his phone?”
“No.”
Harry’s jaw tightened. I watched the anger flare up her throat and into her face, watched her swallow it because she knew I couldn’t hold hers on top of my own. Tris looked at the floor, and I caught the grief there, the private disappointment of a mother in her son.
“I called him,” I said. My voice sounded dead even in my own ears. “Before I even called the ambulance. I called him first because he’s a doctor. I thought he’d know what to do. I thought he’d come.”
“Steph,” my mother started, but I wasn’t finished.
“I called him eleven times while I was losing our baby on the stairs, and he didn’t answer once.”
Silence settled over the room, the heavy kind, full of everything no one wanted to be the first to say.
“Do you want me to keep trying him?” Tris asked carefully. “He should know. He should be here.”
“No.” The word came out sharp and final. “I don’t want to see him right now. I can’t. I called him when I needed him most and he wasn’t there. He’s never there anymore. He’s been gone for so long I don’t even know how to miss him.”
Harry squeezed my hand. Her eyes were wet, but her voice held. “Then he doesn’t get to be here. Not until you’re ready. If you’re ever ready.”
Tris nodded slowly. I could see the war working across her face, the mother wanting to defend her boy losing to the woman who knew exactly what he’d done. “Whatever you need, Stephanie. We’re here.”
My mother smoothed my hair back from my forehead, the same slow motion she’d used when I was small and came in with scraped knees. “You’re not alone, baby. You’ve got us. All of us.”
I looked at the three of them. My mother-in-law, who had folded me into her family before Kevin even proposed.
My own mother, who had driven an hour through the dark to hold my hand.
My sister-in-law and best friend, who was already, I could see it, drafting the ledger of everything her brother would owe.
They loved me. They were here. Not one of them had silenced a phone or chosen a plate of food over my voice breaking on the other end of the line.
But Kevin had.
And lying in that bed, surrounded by family and missing the one person whose absence had a name, I understood that the trust holding our marriage together had snapped tonight in a place too deep to reach.
The nurse came in to prep me for the procedure.
Everyone kissed my forehead and promised to be waiting when I woke.
Kevin never came. And by the time he finally did, I already knew exactly what I was going to do about it.