Chapter 1 The Seventeenth Call #2
She stayed on the bathroom floor until the paramedics arrived.
The housekeeper had gone home hours ago.
The security guard at the front desk let the EMTs in, his face going pale when he saw Maren sitting in the hallway with one hand pressed to her stomach and blood on her dress.
She wondered, distantly, if he would call Callum.
If someone would finally reach him. If her husband would learn about his child from staff because his wife's calls had not been worth answering.
The paramedic who knelt beside her had kind eyes.
"Maren?" he asked. "I'm Theo. We're going to take care of you, okay?"
She nodded, though nothing felt okay.
They asked if she wanted to bring someone.
Her first instinct was still Callum.
The worst part was that some foolish, loyal piece of her still reached for him.
She looked at her phone. No missed calls. No messages.
"No," she said. "There's no one."
Theo did not react, which she appreciated. Pity would have made her fall apart.
They loaded her into the ambulance. The townhouse ceiling swept past above her, all crown molding and soft recessed light. She remembered standing in that foyer as a bride, Callum's hand warm at her waist, Octavia's pearls cold against Maren's cheek when she kissed the air beside her face.
Welcome to the family, Octavia had said.
Maren almost laughed.
The ambulance doors shut.
Siren. Motion. City lights breaking into pieces through the back windows.
Maren turned her head and watched Manhattan smear itself into color. Restaurants still full. People laughing under awnings. A couple arguing at a crosswalk. A woman in red heels running through the rain with her coat over her head.
The world did not stop because one woman was losing everything.
Her phone buzzed once in her hand.
Maren jerked toward it so quickly the paramedic glanced up.
Not Callum.
A text from an unknown number.
She opened it before she could stop herself.
The photo loaded slowly.
Callum and Isolde again, but closer. Candid. His head tilted toward hers. Her hand against his chest. The kind of image that let strangers build a love story in the empty space between two bodies.
Below it, a message.
Some women are remembered. Some are married.
Maren read it twice.
the pain tore through her again, and the phone slid from her fingers.
At the hospital, everything became too bright.
White walls. Blue curtains. Rubber soles moving fast against polished floors. A nurse asking for her date of birth. Another asking when the bleeding started. Someone wrapping a cuff around her arm. Someone else saying her blood pressure was low.
Maren answered what she could.
No, she had not fallen.
No, she had not taken anything.
Yes, this was her first pregnancy.
Yes, her husband was alive.
No, he was not here.
That one made the nurse pause.
Only for a second.
she kept writing.
They took blood. They wheeled her into ultrasound. The room was dimmer there, and somehow worse for it. Maren stared at the ceiling while the technician moved with careful professionalism, her face arranged into a neutral expression that revealed nothing.
Maren wanted to ask.
She could not make her mouth work.
The machine hummed.
The technician clicked something. Measured something. Paused.
Maren's heartbeat thundered in her ears.
the doctor came in, a woman with silver at her temples and tired eyes that had not gone unkind.
"Mrs. Strathe," she said.
Maren flinched at the name.
The doctor pulled up a stool beside her. "You're experiencing a threatened miscarriage."
The words entered the room and stole the air.
"But," the doctor continued gently, "there is still cardiac activity. The pregnancy is still viable right now."
Maren turned her head.
"What?"
The doctor's expression softened. "The baby still has a heartbeat."
For a second, Maren did not understand.
the sound came.
Faint. Rapid. Impossible.
A tiny galloping rhythm filling the dim room.
Maren covered her mouth with both hands.
She cried then. Not beautifully. Not quietly. She cried in a way that made her shoulders shake and her throat hurt, because something inside her had stayed. Against fear, against blood, against seventeen unanswered calls.
The baby had stayed.
The doctor explained bed rest. Follow-up care. Warning signs. More bloodwork. No stress if possible, which struck Maren as so absurd she almost laughed again.
No stress.
She nodded anyway.
A nurse helped clean her up and found her a hospital gown. Someone brought warm blankets. Someone placed her phone on the little table beside the bed.
Still no missed calls.
At 1:46 a.m., Callum's name finally lit up.
For three rings, she could not move.
On the fourth, she answered.
There was noise behind him. Music. Voices. The soft, expensive chaos of an event ending late.
"Maren," Callum said. "I saw your calls."
His tone was not frightened.
Not yet.
It was irritated. Controlled. The voice of a man stepping away from a room full of people to handle something inconvenient.
"What happened?"
Maren looked down at the hospital bracelet around her wrist.
at the IV taped to her hand.
at the dark red smear still caught beneath one fingernail, the one the nurse had missed.
She thought of the dinner cooling on the table. The gray ribbon in her drawer. Isolde's silver dress. Seventeen calls vanishing into nothing.
Her voice, when it came, sounded far away.
"Nothing," she said.
A pause.
"What do you mean, nothing?"
Maren closed her eyes.
"I mean it's too late."
she ended the call.