Chapter 2 - THE CHILD CHRISTMAS ALMOST TOOK
The paramedics arrived nine minutes later.
David attempted to speak for me until Rachel told them she had seen Sylvia push me. Two other guests admitted hearing David refuse to call for help. The remaining guests suddenly became fascinated by their coats.
At the hospital, an ultrasound showed a partial placental abruption. My daughter’s heart rate kept dropping.
The obstetrician did not offer false reassurance.
“We need to deliver her now.”
David appeared outside the operating room with Sylvia and demanded to be included in the medical decisions. A nurse checked my chart, saw that he was my husband and asked whether I wanted him present.
“No.”
It was the first uncomplicated answer I had given in years.
My daughter, Grace, was born by emergency cesarean section shortly after nine that night. She weighed three pounds, eleven ounces and went directly to the neonatal intensive care unit.
I did not hear her cry.
For hours, that absence became the only sound I could think about.
My father reached Knoxville after midnight. He came alone, without court staff or security beyond the state trooper who had driven him from Nashville. He wore a dark overcoat over a Christmas tie I remembered from childhood.
He stopped beside my bed but did not touch me.
“You came,” I said.
“You called.”
“I called before.”
His expression tightened.
“No, Anna. You didn’t.”
He took a bundle of folded papers from his briefcase. They were emails sent from my old account during the first year of my marriage.
Stop contacting me. David is my family now.
Do not come to our house.
I don’t want you involved when the baby is born.
The messages sounded angry enough to be mine.
I had never written them.
Dad had also brought three unopened birthday cards. Each had been returned from my address marked REFUSED BY RESIDENT.
“I thought you chose him,” he said.
“I thought you chose your reputation over me.”
Three years earlier, my father had objected to David before our wedding. He said David isolated me during disagreements and seemed unusually interested in what family information I kept private.
I accused him of judging David because he came from a poorer family.
After the wedding, David changed our internet provider, combined our phone plans and insisted that married couples should not keep separate passwords.
I called it intimacy.
Dad looked toward the NICU corridor.
“Did he know who I was?”
“I never told him.”
A nurse entered with an update. Grace was stable but needed respiratory support. I could see her after the anesthesia wore off.
Before leaving, the nurse handed me a clear evidence bag containing the pieces of my broken phone.
May you like
The back cover had come loose when David smashed it.
Inside, beneath the battery casing, was a small tracking tag I had never placed there.
