Chapter 10
The cramps started during the second period.
I was twelve weeks pregnant. I hadn’t told Cade.
I was waiting for after the playoffs — that was what I’d told myself, that was the reasonable, logical, well-scheduled reason for the silence.
The playoffs were his whole world right now.
The team was his family right now. And the baby — our baby, the one that was twelve weeks old and the size of a lime and had a heartbeat I’d heard on a Tuesday in a doctor’s office while Cade was at practice — the baby could wait until the ice went quiet and the season ended and the world got small enough for news that would change everything.
That was what I told myself. The truth was different.
The truth was that I wasn’t sure how he’d react, and the uncertainty was a door I wasn’t ready to open.
Because telling Cade about the baby meant watching his face and reading it — the way I read everything, the way I’d been trained by three years of invisible work to notice every shift in his expression — and whatever I saw there would be the truth, and the truth might not be the thing I needed.
The second cramp came three minutes later. Sharper. Lower. A pain that had a direction to it, a downward pull, like the baby was reaching for something or letting go of something, and I didn’t know which.
I went to the bathroom. The blood was there.
Not a lot — not at first — but enough. Enough to turn the white tile red.
Enough to make my hands shake on the edge of the sink.
Enough to make me understand, in the way the body understands things before the mind can process them, that something was wrong.
I called Cade. The phone rang five times and went to voicemail. His recorded voice said, “You’ve reached Cade Calloway, leave a message,” in the easy, half-grinning tone of a man who had recorded his voicemail greeting on a good day and never thought to change it.
I called again. Voicemail.
Again. Voicemail.
I drove myself to the hospital because there was no one else to call.
Rowan was at the arena — I knew this, I’d seen her Instagram story an hour ago, a selfie in the press box with the caption Game 7.
Let’s go. Joss was in New York. My parents were in Cincinnati.
The team wives were at the watch party, and calling them would mean explaining, and explaining would mean admitting, and admitting would mean the secret was out and I wasn’t ready, I wasn’t ready for any of this, not the blood and not the cramps and not the drive to the hospital with the seat pushed all the way back and my phone in the cupholder calling Cade every three minutes and getting voicemail every time.
Four calls. Five. Six.
I drove through Nashville with one hand on the steering wheel and the other pressing against my abdomen as if I could hold the baby in place through willpower, through the desperate physics of a woman who has spent three years holding everything together and cannot accept that this is the thing that falls apart.
The streets were half-empty. Everyone was at the game or watching the game or at a bar watching the game or in a living room watching the game.
Nashville during a championship game 7 was a city holding its breath, every screen tuned to the same channel, every bar spilling the same roar onto the same sidewalks.
I drove through it like a woman in a different dimension — the same geography, different physics.
My Nashville was quiet. My Nashville was blood on a bathroom floor and a phone that rang and rang and never answered.
A traffic light turned red and I stopped and gripped the steering wheel with both hands and the cramp that came next was the worst yet — a sharp, twisting pain that started low and radiated upward, the kind of pain that erases everything else, that reduces the world to the body and the body to the pain and the pain to a single, physical fact: something inside me was ending.
The light turned green. I drove.
The hospital was bright. Too bright. The emergency room had the fluorescent quality of a place designed to keep you awake when your body wants to shut down.
I gave my name at the desk. I said the words — pregnant, twelve weeks, bleeding, cramps — and the nurse led me to a bed and put an IV in my arm and asked if I had someone with me, and I said he was coming, and she nodded with the kind expression of a woman who had heard that before.
I called Cade. Seven. Eight. Nine.
The doctor came. She was young — younger than me, which seemed wrong, seemed impossible, that the person delivering this news should be younger than the person receiving it.
She had brown hair pulled back in a ponytail and kind eyes behind rectangular glasses and she introduced herself with a name I immediately forgot because names were the first thing to go when the rest of the world was collapsing.
She did the ultrasound. The gel was cold on my skin.
The wand moved across my abdomen and the screen showed the inside of my body in gray and black and white, and I looked for the heartbeat — the small, rapid flutter I’d seen three weeks ago, the one the other doctor had said was “strong and right on schedule” — and I couldn’t find it.
The doctor’s face told me before her mouth did. The way her eyes changed. The way her hand paused on the wand. The way she turned the screen slightly, as if to give herself a better angle, but really to give herself a moment before she said the words.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “There’s no heartbeat.”
I was twenty-seven years old and lying on a hospital bed with my husband’s voicemail in my ear and my baby’s silence on a screen, and the room was bright and the world was loud and somewhere in this city a man I’d married was playing a hockey game and didn’t know.
The doctor said words. Medical words. Words about the body and what happens when a pregnancy ends and what to expect and when to follow up.
She said them gently, professionally, in the specific cadence of a woman who has delivered this news before and understands that the words don’t matter but the saying of them does.
I nodded. I said thank you. I was very polite about the death of my baby.
I was exactly the patient nurses remember fondly — composed, grateful, no trouble at all.
Inside, I was a house on fire with all the doors locked.
I called Cade again. Ten. Eleven.
The eleventh call. The last one. I held the phone to my ear and listened to it ring and watched the ceiling of a hospital room and the last thread of something — hope, maybe, or the belief that I mattered enough to interrupt a hockey game — stretched and snapped.
Voicemail. His easy half-grin, preserved in audio. Leave a message.
I didn’t leave a message. What would I have said?
I’m losing the baby you don’t know about in a hospital you don’t know I’m in and you’re scoring goals and I can see you on the television that nobody asked me if I wanted on, and I need you, I need you, I need you to show up for the first time in three years for something that isn’t hockey, and you can’t hear me because you’re not listening because you’ve never been listening, not really, not in the way that counts.
I set the phone on the bed. I stopped calling.
On the television mounted to the wall above my bed — the same television that was in every hospital room, playing news and game shows and the background noise of institutional waiting — the game was on.
I hadn’t asked for it. A nurse had turned it on, or it had been on when I arrived, or the universe had decided that the cruelty of this night required a visual component.
Nashville was winning. The score was 3-2.
Cade had scored twice, the first on a breakaway, the second on a power play, and the arena was electric, the crowd on their feet, the noise so loud it came through the television speakers as a wall of undifferentiated roar.
The camera found him after the second goal — sweaty, grinning, the mouthguard hanging from his helmet like a question mark — and he raised his stick and the crowd screamed and I lay in a hospital bed and watched my husband celebrate on a screen above me and thought: He doesn’t know.
He doesn’t know about any of this. He’s in there and I’m in here and the distance between us is not a stadium, it’s a lifetime.
Third period. The clock wound down. Cade scored again — a wrist shot from the circle, the kind he practiced a thousand times a week, the kind he could make with his eyes closed — and the hat trick was complete.
Three goals. Game 7. The championship. Hats rained from the stands.
The bench emptied. The team poured onto the ice.
The camera found him. Close-up. His face was split with the widest grin I’d ever seen, the full-wattage version, the one I used to get in the bar in Nashville before I was anyone’s wife or anyone’s loss.
He was screaming, or laughing, or both — a sound that only happens when you’ve done the biggest thing you’ll ever do and you know it, in your body, in your bones.
Then he stopped. The camera was still on him — the broadcast, the millions of viewers, the whole country watching — and he reached into his equipment bag on the bench and pulled out his phone. He looked at the screen.
I knew what was on the screen. Eleven missed calls. Emory. Emory. Emory. Eleven times.
He looked at the phone. He looked at the screen. And then he put it back in his bag. He slid it in with one hand and turned back to the ice and someone poured champagne over his head and the celebration began.
I watched him do it. Lying in a hospital bed with blood on the gown they’d given me and an IV in my arm and the silence of a heartbeat that was no longer there, I watched my husband check his phone and put it back and choose the celebration over whatever the phone was trying to tell him.