At a family dinner, I said, “I’m about to give birth.” My parents sneered, “Call a cab. We’re busy.” I drove myself to the ER in unbearable pain. A week later, my mom showed up at my door and said, “Let me see the baby.” I looked at her and replied, “What baby?”..
At a family dinner, I said, “I’m about to give birth.” My parents scoffed, “Call a cab. We’re busy.” I got myself to the ER through blinding pain. A week later, my mom came to my door and said, “Let me see the baby.” I met her gaze and said, “What baby?”…..
“I’m about to give birth,” I gasped, clutching the edge of my parents’ dining table as another contraction tore through me.
My mother didn’t even rise.
She lifted her wineglass and said, “Then call a cab. We’re eating.”
My father barely glanced up. “You’re thirty, Ava.
Figure it out.”
Pain bent me in half. I dropped to one knee on the floor, breathless, shaking, humiliated. No one moved.
My brother kept staring at his plate. My mother reached for the bread basket like I was interrupting a show.
I drove myself to St. Mary’s Regional with my vision swimming and my hands slick on the wheel.
By the time I staggered into the ER, blood was trailing down my legs. A nurse caught me before I collapsed.
“How far along?”
Then everything dissolved into noise and light. Hands.
Commands. A doctor saying fetal distress. Another voice telling me not to push.
Someone asking where the father was. I tried to say my husband’s name, but it came out fractured. He had vanished three months ago without a trace, and that was the last thought I had before darkness took me.
When I woke up, there was no baby beside me.
No cry.
No bassinet. No pink hospital blanket.
Only a woman from administration sitting next to a state trooper.
The woman leaned forward gently. “Ms.
Carter, before we discuss your child, there’s something you need to know about the man you listed as the father.”
A week later, my mother came to my front door and said, “Let me see the baby.”
I looked straight at her and said, “What baby?”
Then a man’s voice came from the shadows behind her.
“Ava,” he said, “don’t make this harder. We know what you took.”
I had thought waking up without my baby was the worst thing imaginable. I was wrong.
The story doesn’t end here — it continues on the next page.
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