Vance hadn’t left.
He stood near the curtained entrance, his back to the fabric wall, a broad, dark silhouette blocking out the noise and light from the hallway.
He wasn’t looking at me.
He was staring at a point on the opposite wall, his posture rigid.
The wand pressed against me, cold and foreign.
On the screen, a blurry, shifting landscape of greys and blacks appeared.
I didn’t know what I was looking at.
I didn’t know what any of it meant.
My heart was a frantic bird trapped in my ribs, beating against the cage of my bones.
*Please*, I thought, a wordless, desperate prayer to nothing and everything.
*Please, please, please.*
The tech moved the wand.
Clicked a button on the keyboard.
A still image froze on the screen.
More grey shapes.
She was too quiet.
She measured something, her brow furrowed.
The silence in the room grew thick and heavy, pressing down on my chest.
The only sound was the low hum of the machine.
She took more pictures.
More clicking.
More silence.
Finally, the doctor wiped the gel from my stomach with a rough paper towel.
“I’m going to get the doctor to take a look,” she said softly.
She wouldn’t meet my eyes as she left.
Dr. Evans came back in.
She looked at the frozen images on the screen for a long moment.
Her kind face was set in careful, neutral lines.
She turned to me.
“Nerissa,” she said.
Her voice was gentle.
It was the gentleness that made my stomach drop, a free-fall into ice water.
“I’m so sorry. There’s no cardiac activity. It looks like you were about six weeks along. This is a miscarriage.”
The words landed, but they didn’t make sense at first.
*Cardiac activity.
Six weeks.
Miscarriage.*
Then they slammed into me, one after the other.
No heart.
No beat.
My baby.
Gone.
Already gone.
For who knows how long.
A sound escaped me.
It wasn’t a cry.
It was the empty, hollow gasp of all the air and all the hope I hadn’t even known I was carrying, rushing out of me at once.
The room tilted.
The grey shapes on the screen blurred into a meaningless smear.
My eyes found Vance.
He had turned.
He was staring at the dark, still ultrasound screen, at the proof of absence.
His jaw was clenched so tight a muscle jumped in his cheek, a furious, rhythmic ticking.
His eyes weren’t cold.
They were burning with a pure, stark rage.
Not at me.
At the universe.
At the brutal, unfair math of it all.
A single, hot tear traced a path from the corner of my eye, down my temple, into my hair.
I didn’t move to wipe it.
Vance saw it.
His gaze dropped from the screen to my face.
For a second, the rage in his eyes flickered, replaced by something else.
Something harder to name.
He didn’t say a word.
He just stepped forward, reached down, and covered my cold, limp hand on the gurney with his own.
His hand was warm.
Heavy.
An anchor in a sudden, stormless sea.
He didn’t squeeze.
He just held it there, a simple, human point of contact.
He said nothing.
From the bay next to us, separated only by a thin blue curtain, the voices started.
Jovi’s voice, trembling with perfect, breathless fear.
“Is he okay? Please, you have to tell me my baby’s okay.”
A different doctor, a man, calm and reassuring.
“Everything looks perfect, Mrs. Blackwood. Strong, steady heartbeat. Spotting in the first trimester can be very normal. Your baby is perfectly healthy.”
A wet, relieved sob from Jovi.
Then Zane’s voice, thick with an emotion I knew intimately—the awed, dizzying relief of a disaster averted.
“You hear that, Jovi? He’s fine. They’re both fine.”
I flinched as if I’d been slapped.
The contrast was a physical pain, a knife twisted beside the deep, hollow ache already inside me.
In this room: silence, stillness, an ended story.
In the next: relief, joy, a future being printed out on glossy paper.
Vance’s hand tightened over mine.
Not a gentle squeeze.
A hard, almost painful clamp.
When I looked at his face, his expression had turned to granite.
His eyes were fixed on the curtain as if he could burn through it with the force of his disgust.
They moved me to a recovery bay to wait.
I was a passive thing, letting them guide the wheelchair.
Vance walked beside me, his hand now on the chair’s handle.
When a nurse tried to take over, he gave a short, sharp shake of his head.
We were almost to the doors leading out to the main hallway when they swung open.
Zane was helping Jovi walk out.
She was leaning on him, one hand still pressed to her flat stomach, the other clutching a black-and-white sonogram photo.
She looked up, her eyes still shiny with happy tears.
She saw us.
Everything stopped.
The tableau was grotesque.
Me, pale as death in a wheelchair, a rough hospital blanket over my lap.
Vance, standing protectively behind me, his posture possessive and rigid.
Zane, his arm supporting Jovi, his face a confused mask of lingering relief that was rapidly crumbling into something else as he took in my appearance.
His eyes darted from my face to the wheelchair to Vance.