Chapter 29 Steven
Chapter twenty-nine
Steven
When It Was Survival
I’m a prideful man.
I hate admitting it, but it can be hard to hide, especially when I’m sitting in a doctor’s office as a doctor myself.
Pride has always been a part of me. It’s what’s pushed me through sleepless nights, through years of long shifts, making decisions that could change someone’s life in seconds.
I pride myself on being good at what I do, though I try to keep the ugly side of it subdued.
But then there are moments where containing it seems to be impossible.
The righteous heat that burns in my chest when I know, know, that I’m probably smarter, more experienced, or just plain right.
It’s a feeling that’s hard to bury once it starts rising.
The blood rushes to my ears, and I have to clench my jaw to keep from saying something I’ll regret.
Most of the time, I manage to stay quiet. I’ll nod politely, let the conversation end, then rant to myself later in the car where no one can hear me.
But right now, I can’t keep my mouth shut.
“Dr. Jones, I need you to calm down.”
“Check again!” I shout before I even realize I’ve raised my voice. My pulse is racing, and even though it’s probably sixty degrees in this room, my body is on fire. Rational thought is lost to a tangled blur of panic and outrage. I take a breath, force it through my teeth, and add, “Please.”
The sonographer looks at Dr. Malone, who gives her a small, measured nod.
She hesitates before squeezing another drop of gel onto the edge of the wand and placing it on Emma’s belly a second time.
Dr. Malone steps closer to the monitor as waves of black and gray stretch across the screen. My heart pounds in my throat.
I squeeze Emma’s hand. It’s cold and slick against mine. She won’t look at me, keeping her eyes fixed on the monitor, tears already cascading down her cheeks. Her hand starts to tremble as the sonographer moves the wand across her stomach.
Three weeks ago was the test.
After a year of actively trying for another baby, we finally got that faint pink line. And it felt like everything in our home changed overnight. The tension, the distance…all of it gone, and I felt like I could breathe again.
It’s cliche, I know, to think a baby could fix your marriage.
But damn it, my wife wanted another baby.
And I would give her anything she wanted.
We’d spent months talking it through, weighing the pros and cons, always circling back to the same fear: her mental health.
As our family grows, her anxiety seems to grow with it.
Adding another child for her to worry about on top of everything else wasn’t ideal for me at first.
But when she smiled at that test, all of it seemed to fade for a moment.
I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t stressed. Another mouth to feed in this economy isn’t exactly comforting. But deep down, I believed we’d make it work. We always had.
So, we started planning. We pulled down boxes labeled baby from the attic, moved the boys’ play fort to the garage, cleared out the office, ordered a crib. Maybe it seemed like overkill this early on, but we knew what to do. We’d done this before.
It felt like we were us again. Laughing, planning, hoping.
Living inside that fragile, beautiful bubble of anticipation.
I’d catch her humming in the kitchen again.
I’d see that spark in her eyes I hadn’t seen in months.
I had my wife back—something I’ve been aching for longer than I realized.
I had no idea how far apart we’d grown until last year.
After my mom fell, it became abundantly clear how distant I had become, how unaware of my own family I was.
I was so distracted, wrapped up in work, in providing, in being the man who fixes things.
I was so focused on doing for my family that I’d forgotten the most important part was being with them.
And this baby, this new life, felt like our second chance.
So you can’t blame me for being a little on edge when they tell us there’s been a mistake.
We stare at the screen for what feels like an eternity, waiting for something, anything, to happen. Holding our breaths, with the steady tick of a clock the only noise in the room.
Then Dr. Malone exhales softly, his finger hovering over the machine, before he finally clicks it off. Emma begins to sob, and my chest tears open with it.
“I’m so sorry,” Dr. Malone says quietly. “We’ll give you some time.”
Neither of us speaks as they leave the room, Emma’s cries filling the room like a storm you can’t take cover from. I feel helpless as she falls apart right before my eyes. I want to hold her, keep her together, but she won’t look at me. Her eyes are locked on the black screen.
“It doesn’t make any sense,” she says after a long moment. Her voice is a frayed tendril of emotion, slowly unraveling with each shaky breath.
The red light at the bottom of the monitor blinks in rhythm with the clock. Blink. Tick. Blink. Tick. My ears pulse, and the floor beneath me seems to shake. Is this really happening?
“What did I do wrong?” she cries.
That question—those five words—break me.
I drop to my knees next to her, cupping her face in my hands. “You did nothing wrong, Emma. Do you hear me? This was not your fault.”
My hands tremble against her cheeks as I try to meet her eyes, but she doesn’t meet mine, still staring at the screen. Her tears hang from her lashes, frozen there. Look at me, Emma.
“Maybe I—”
“Emma, no. Please. These things happen.” It feels stupid to say that.
I feel stupid thinking it. But it’s the truth.
Chemical pregnancies happen. And no matter how often I’ve seen it happen, no matter how many charts I’ve read, how many women I’ve comforted in exam rooms like this, I never thought it would happen to us.
To her. My Emma.
I’m at a loss, willing her to look at me, but she never does.
She’s never felt more far away than she does right now.
I ache for her but also for myself and what we lost, what we thought we were getting back.
I thought we were going to have another baby.
And whether there was ever really a heartbeat there or not, the love was real. The hope was real. And now it’s gone.
A stabbing pain spreads through my chest, wrapping tight around my ribs and straining my breaths.
There’s a soft knock on the door, and a nurse steps inside. She’s holding a folder, the “loss folder.” We’ve had our fair share of those in the ER. I could never bring myself to be the one to deliver them, begging my nurses to do it. I never thought I’d be on the receiving end of it.
“Mrs. Jones, would you like assistance?” she asks gently, gesturing toward Emma’s clothes folded neatly in the chair. The polite way of saying, we need the room.
Emma sits up, declining help from the nurse or me. She pulls herself together just enough to make it out of the clinic, her movements shaky but determined.
I follow her out, but she doesn’t head for the car. Instead, she takes a left and heads toward the street corner.
“Em,” I call after her, “where are you going?”
She doesn’t answer me, still walking, faster with each step. Panic lodges in my chest as I chase her down three quiet blocks, past dark shop windows, the diner, until I realize where she’s going. The small lake at the edge of town. And it’s too late to stop her.
When the rickety wooden dock comes into view, she breaks into a run. Fast. Her hair falls from its clip, her cardigan slips down her arms, her phone and purse fall to the ground. She doesn’t stop.
“Emma!” I shout, sprinting after her.
She races across the narrow bridge to the dock, the thin railing the only thing between her and the black, murky water.
“Emma!”
She slams into the railing, collapsing over it, and a scream tears out of her. It slices through the still air.
It’s a sound I’ve never heard from her before. It’s grief, excruciating and raw, and it stuns me. She’s fifty feet from me now, but I can see her shaking. By the time I reach her, she’s coming apart, gasping, trembling, falling. I catch her before she hits the boards and crush her to my chest.
She breaks right there, in my arms. Everything she’s been afraid to let show over the last few years finally comes out.
The anger, sadness, the sheer fight she’s been running from.
She hits my chest, the air, the space between us, her sobs shaking both of us.
Anger and loss and years of swallowed pain wrap around us like smoke, thick and toxic.
“Shh, shh,” I whisper, because I don’t know what else to do. “I’m here. I’m here.”
Her tears soak through my shirt. Mine come too. I hold her until the fight drains out of her, until her body goes heavy in my arms and her cries fade into ragged breaths.
“There was never a baby,” she cries into my chest. “It was a lie.”
“It was real to us,” I say, my voice breaking. “They were real.”
Because it was. Every bit of it. The joy, the plans, the hope…it was all real. I hold her tighter, as if that closeness could somehow absorb her pain, could make it bearable.
We sit there on the dock, long into the morning, clinging to each other.
And somehow, in the middle of all that wreckage, we’re closer than we’ve been in years.
It guts me to realize that it took something this cruel to pull us back together.
Is that what happens when you’ve been with someone for so long?
The happy moments blur, and it’s the hard ones that weld you together?
Maybe love isn’t what keeps a marriage alive. Maybe it’s survival.
But can we survive this?