Chapter 1
The pounding came again, hard enough to rattle the front door in its frame.
Lucas lowered the cracked phone from his ear. My father’s voice still came through the speaker, steady and close, though he was miles away.
“Lucas,” Dad said. “Move away from Ava.”
Diane’s arms tightened across her chest. “You can’t just send police to someone’s house.”
“They’re already there,” Dad said.
Lucas looked at me, not the door. His expression had changed. The smirk was gone, but something colder had taken its place.
“You’re going to regret this,” he said.
I pressed one palm to the kitchen floor. The other hovered over my belly, afraid to touch too hard. The tightening inside me came and went in waves that left no room for thought. I kept my eyes on the phone because it was the only thing in the room that had carried my voice outside.
The pounding stopped.
“Police department,” a man called from the other side. “We need you to open the door.”
Lucas took a step toward the hall.
“Don’t,” I said.
The word barely made it out. Still, it made him pause.
For one breath, nobody moved. Then a woman’s voice came through the door.
“Sir, open it now. We have a report of a pregnant woman bleeding and injured.”
Diane’s face drained of color. She glanced at Lucas, as if he might still have a sentence polished enough to shut out what was coming.
He set my phone on the counter.
“You fell,” he said, quietly now. “That’s what happened.”
The room tilted. I gripped the cabinet handle until the wood bit into my palm.
“I know what happened.”
Lucas stared at me. A warning, an order, a plea—I had learned to read all three in the same look.
The lock turned.
Two officers entered. One was a tall man with a hand near his belt; the other, a woman with close-cropped dark hair, looked first at me on the floor and then at the blood beneath me.
“Everybody stay where you are,” she said.
Lucas lifted both hands. His voice changed at once, smoothing itself into something reasonable.
“Officer, thank God. My wife had an accident. She’s pregnant and emotional, and my mother and I were trying to help.”
The woman officer came toward me, then crouched several feet away.
“Ma’am, can you tell me your name?”
“Ava Collins.”
“Are you hurt?”
I looked at Lucas. He stood in the kitchen doorway, hands still raised, watching me as if the right answer belonged to him.
“Yes,” I said. “I’m bleeding.”
The officer’s expression tightened. “The ambulance is coming. Don’t try to stand.”
Behind her, the male officer asked Lucas to step into the living room. Lucas hesitated.
“I’m her husband.”
“Step into the living room, please.”
Diane moved to follow him.
“Ma’am, stay here,” the female officer said.
Diane’s mouth fell open. “I live here.”
“And I need you to stay where you are.”
Her outrage flickered into fear. Lucas walked out without another word. The male officer followed close behind.
The woman officer stayed near me. She asked if I knew what day it was, whether I had lost consciousness, whether I could feel the baby move. Each answer took effort. I could feel movement, I told her, but the pains were sharper now, and I didn’t know what the blood meant.
She didn’t pretend to know either.
“Help is on the way,” she said. “You’re not alone.”
That should have been an ordinary reassurance. Instead, it cracked something open in me. I had spent months learning how to make my fear quiet enough for Lucas not to notice. Now a stranger was asking questions as if my answers mattered.
My father was still on the line.
“Ava,” he said. “Stay with me.”
“I’m here.”
“I know.”
The officers’ questions carried from the living room. Lucas told them I’d slipped. Diane said I had been unsteady all evening. Their versions arrived in calm, practiced pieces, while my body stayed on the kitchen floor.
The female officer glanced at the phone on the counter.
“Is that your phone?”
“Yes. He threw it.”
Lucas’s voice rose from the next room. “It fell.”
“I saw him throw it,” I said.
The officer looked at me, then at the phone’s fractured screen. She didn’t argue with my words or soften them for me.
A siren swelled somewhere outside. A moment later, the front door opened again, and the house filled with brisk footsteps and the rustle of medical bags.
The paramedics came into the kitchen. One knelt beside me and introduced herself, then asked me to describe the pain. Another checked my pulse and blood pressure while a third placed a blanket over my legs. Their voices were calm and quick, but their faces made my fear sharpen.
“Is my baby okay?” I asked.
“We’re going to get you checked right away,” the paramedic said. “Let’s focus on getting you safely to the hospital.”
They lifted the blanket, saw the blood, and exchanged a glance too brief for Lucas to notice from the living room. I noticed.
“Is it serious?” I whispered.
“It’s enough that we’re moving quickly.”
The words punched the air from my lungs. I tried to sit up, and pain seized my abdomen.
“Easy,” the paramedic said. “Don’t fight us. We’ve got you.”
They worked around me carefully, securing the stretcher and making space in the narrow kitchen. The female officer stepped back to let them through, then pointed to the counter where the phone lay.
“Can you photograph the scene?” she asked the other officer. “The phone, the kitchen, the visible injuries.”
A shutter clicked.
Lucas appeared at the edge of the room. The male officer stood between us.
“Let me talk to my wife,” Lucas said.
“No,” I answered.
My voice was weak. It was still mine.
Lucas’s jaw flexed. “Ava, you don’t understand what you’re doing.”
The paramedic adjusted the blanket over my stomach. “She doesn’t need to talk right now.”
“I need to tell them what happened,” I said.
The woman officer leaned close enough for me to see the small crease between her brows.
“You can tell me. Take your time.”
I looked at Lucas. At Diane behind him, rigid and silent. At the blood on the pale floor tile.
“He hit me,” I said. “Then his mother grabbed me. I fell against the counter. When I tried to call for help, he threw my phone and blocked the door.”
For a heartbeat, the house went quiet.
Then Lucas gave a short, disbelieving laugh.
“That’s not true. She fell.”
The officer turned toward him. “We’ll speak with you separately.”
The paramedics rolled me through the living room. Diane stood beside the couch, arms hanging at her sides now. She didn’t call me a liar. She didn’t ask if the baby was safe. She just watched.
At the front door, cold night air brushed my face. The ambulance lights painted the porch red, then blue, then red again. I tried to hold on to my father’s voice from the phone, but the stretcher wheels bumped over the threshold and his words faded beneath the paramedic’s instructions.
They lifted me into the ambulance.
May you like
As the doors began to close, Lucas spoke to the officer in the front yard, his voice clear enough to follow me into the dark.
“She fell,” he said. “It was her own fault.”
