“How much longer?” “It never fully stopped.” Dr. Yuen looked at her for exactly 2 seconds. Then she turned and said something to the nurse behind her in a register too low for Violetta to catch. The nurse left quickly. Dr. Yuen put her stethoscope in her ears and pressed the bell to Violetta’s abdomen without further preamble.
Listened. Her expression didn’t change, but something in her shoulders did. A very slight settling, like a door finding its frame. “Heartbeat is present and regular,” she said. “The baby is stressed, but stable. We’re going to run blood work, and I want an ultrasound within the next 20 minutes.” “What do you think it is?” “I don’t think things. I test them.
” She pulled the stethoscope from her ears. “Who did your prenatal care?” “Dr. Marsh at Northwestern Affiliated Holloway Family Medical. My husband’s family endowed the wing. Dr. Ewen wrote the name down without commenting on the rest of it, but she wrote it down the way someone writes a name they intend to revisit.
The door opened. Ronan Voss stood in the frame. He’d changed out of the wet coat. She registered this with the specific irrelevant attention the mind pays to small details when the large ones are too much. Dark shirt now. No tie. He looked at Dr. Ewen first, not Violetta. Status? Baby is stable.
Mother’s hypothermic, dehydrated, showing symptoms I need to investigate before I characterize. Dr. Ewen’s voice had not changed registers for anyone in the room. She needs rest, warmth, IV fluids, and no stress for the next several hours. Are any of those things achievable in your facility? All of them. Then I’ll update you when I have something to update you with.
She looked at him in a way that was not particularly deferential. That means you wait outside. Ronan looked at Violetta. She looked back at him. She was sitting on the edge of the examination table in a wet coat that hadn’t dried, with her hair pressed flat against her skull, and her hands in her lap.
And she was aware of how thoroughly undone she appeared, and she was too tired to manage it. Thank you, she said. For the car, for the stop, for the fact that she wasn’t still on the road. He nodded once, left. The door closed. Dr. Ewen turned back to her with the syringe for the blood draw, and said very quietly, not looking up from the vein she was preparing, “How did you end up on that road?” Violetta looked at the ceiling.
“My husband threw me out.” Dr. Ewen pressed the needle in with the clean precision of someone who had done it 10,000 times. “Tonight?” “About 2 hours ago.” A pause. The baby’s father? “He He says no. Violetta exhaled. He’s wrong, but I can’t prove it to him right now, and I couldn’t prove it 2 hours ago either, so Dr.
Yuan withdrew the needle, pressed gauze to the site, taped it down. The symptoms you described, the extended nausea, the fatigue disproportionate to your stage, do you have documentation of those? Blood work from your regular physician? I have records. They’re at the house, which I no longer have access to. I’ll need to contact Dr. Marsh’s office.
You won’t get them to release anything. My husband’s family funds that practice. Dr. Yuan looked at her then, fully, the way she hadn’t quite done since Violetta had arrived. I’m going to run a full panel, she said. Not just standard prenatal. Full talk screen, metabolic panel, the works. Do you consent to that? The word talks landed somewhere specific.
Yes, Violetta said. Run everything. Mutt. She slept for 3 hours. She hadn’t intended to. She’d been sitting propped against the pillows with the IV in her arm, and the monitor’s green line making its patient peaks across the screen, the baby’s heartbeat, regular and real and impossibly reassuring. And she’d been planning to stay awake, to think, to figure out the next move.
And then she was waking up with the lights dimmed and a blanket over her that hadn’t been there before, and the particular disorientation of a body that had simply taken what it needed without asking. The monitor still showed the heartbeat. She checked it before she checked anything else. There was a glass of water on the table beside her. She drank all of it.
The room was quiet in the way of places far from traffic. A deep structural quiet, not the muffled quiet of the city at night. Wherever this facility was, it wasn’t in a neighborhood. She’d noticed that in the car. After the density of the residential streets, the landscape had changed. Less light, longer stretches between intersections.
They’d passed through something that felt like a gate, though she hadn’t been sure. She was in Ronan Voss’s house. She’d had time in the car, after the panic had leveled out into something she could hold, to understand this. The convoy. The facility that had no public address. The doctor who answered to him in a way that was respectful but not quite the way employees are respectful of employers.
More lateral, like two people who had history and had worked out their terms. This was not a clinic he’d called on her behalf. This was an infrastructure he maintained. She needed to understand who he was. She also needed to figure out what to do with the next 24 hours, and then the 24 after that. And at some point she was going to have to contact someone who could help her access money, because $63 was not a plan.
