Page 136 of Devilish Ink

Why didn’t they understand? If my baby died it didn’t matter what they did to try to save me. It was over.

I stilled when I felt someone wipe down my stomach and then place two dot monitors. I held my breath as if that would help them get a good reading.

Nurses still tended to my cuts, but I ignored the sting as I looked desperately between the monitor and the doctor’s face as he studied it.

Time seemed to stretch as I waited for something to happen, not even sure what it was that was supposed to happen.

Everything still bustled around me, but the doctor was so still. My eyes darted with increased frequency between his face and the monitor.

I begged for him to sigh in relief, to turn and smile at me. I prayed that I wouldn’t see him slowly close his eyes, preparing himself for a moment before delivering the hard news that would break me forever. It was nearly unbearable, that waiting, waiting, wait—

A second heartbeat.

For a moment the relief wiped away all my pain.

But then the doctor, eyes still fixed on the monitor, said, “Baby’s heartbeat is fast…ultrasound.”

The flurry of movement his words triggered made me panic. My head rolled, eyes searching for some sort of answer to what was going on as someone smeared a cold gel over my belly. The doctor swiped the ultrasound wand over me and cursed.

“Likely a uterine rupture.”

More activity around me. None of it comprehensible to me. In fact, no one even seemed to notice that I was there, something more than just a body on a table.

“What does that mean?” I begged. “Please, just tell me what thatmeans!”

I screamed as a sharp agony cut across my belly like I was being split in two.

Through my haze, I heard a nurse’s shout: “Doctor, she’s bleeding!”

I pressed my fingers against the hot slick on my thighs. I lifted my hand up and even as it shook in front of my eyes, my fingers stained red. So much blood. Too much blood.

I couldn’t breathe.

“What’s happening?” I gasped. “Is it the baby?”

I looked up and saw the doctor’s face filled with dread. I opened my mouth to beg him to tell me something,anything, but at that moment another lashing of pain tore through me. My vision greyed out as I screamed.

The beeping on the monitor grew faster and faster. Was it my heart rate going out of control or was it my baby’s?

An alarm went off, loud and sharp against my ears. My head began to swim. I blinked my eyes open but saw little through the edges of foggy grey.

“Her blood pressure’s dropped.”

“Emergency C-section. Go!”

“If it’s a choice,” I tried to say before I drowned in black, “save my baby.”

LIAM

Of all the instruments of torture, there was none more brutal than time itself.

I sat in a flimsy plastic chair only to decide I wanted to stand. I’d close my eyes only to wrench them open at any sound that might be the doctor pushing through the swinging doors of the ER. An unbearable heat had me tearing at my jacket just seconds before I was tugging my collar tight to my throat, shivering from a feverish cold deep in my bones.

The possibilities of what was happening to Ry while I was away from her tormented my exhausted mind. I saw her screaming my name, reaching out for me, only to find I’d abandoned her once more.

I imagined her body hard as marble, laced with icy blue veins, dead because I hadn’t gotten there fast enough. Grief and helplessness howled like a fierce storm inside me for what felt like years.

When the doors of the ER finally swung open I could barely see the doctor through the burning of my eyes, an older man with small glasses and a mint green cap over his mostly grey hair.

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