N P

e something to plan for instead of something to simply do. The nausea came after, sudden enough that I sat

remembered from a life that hadn't technically happened yet. Normal or not, I didn't trust myself behind the wheel, not with my hands this unsteady, so I called

the back seat with one hand braced against her stomach. I

finished checking in. I gave a name, a reason, a symptom list flattened into words a receptionist could type without blinking. Weakness. Nausea. Wanted to be seen. I didn't say the word pregn

be in shortly, and I sat on the edge of the paper-covered tabl

member the last time I had waite

was pregnant. The l

orridors gone dim from power that was failing in stages instead of all at once. I remembered sitting in a room not unlike this one, waiting for a man whose name I had trusted for years, a man I had let into every

nd me, not to help, but because he needed someth

en now, sitting safe and three months early in a room where none of it h

oor o

I'd never met before whose name I'd forget within the hour, and my whole body wen

was

f the most dangerous things about him. He glanced down at the chart in his hand before he looked up at me properly, and I watched the exact moment r

familiar, entirely unaware of what I already knew he would b

emory of a dying hospital corridor still burning behind my eyes, staring at the one

toward me with a chart in his hand and no ide