There were hands on me, strange, cold, dry hands that were probing, violating. No one was worried enough. No one cared. All of these strangers were letting my words peter out into a void.
“Where the fuck is my baby?” I screamed, sitting up, yanking at the tubes that had become attached to me at some point. My hands were scrambling for the swell of my stomach, desperate to find it, find her safely there. I shouldn’t have needed to touch it; I should’ve known, felt her moving. But I couldn’t feel anything. My arms were lead.
People were looking at me now that I’d screamed like a banshee. There were many of them, in scrubs, white coats, all individual people, all different, distinct people with wants and needs. But they weren’t people to me. Not now.
“Ms. Whitney, you need to calm down and let us do our job,” one of them said.
Arms were pressing me down, my hands still unable to reach my stomach. I thrashed on the bed, fighting against them, fighting against the heaviness of my limbs and the panic clutching at my throat.
More hands now. Words, trying to placate me. I didn’t understand anything they said.
“Where is Karson?” I cried, my eyes darting around the room looking for him. I was desperate for safety, for warmth, for my man to hold these people by their throats and crush their windpipes if they didn’t answer my fucking question.
“Ms. Whitney, we’re here to take care of you, but you need to calm down,” the doctor repeated in that infuriatingly calm, detached tone.
“You need to tell me if my baby is okay!” I screamed, fighting harder now.
There were more arms. There was pain, but I didn’t care about that.
Then there was a prick in my arm.
Then there was nothing.
KARSON
I knew before I walked in the doors that our child had a low chance of surviving when its mother had been shot. Knew that I should’ve accepted that. But there was something burning deep inside me, barely flickering but there, that hoped. For a miracle.
The doctors didn’t try to fight against whatever the fuck rules they had against releasing information to people that weren’t family. Not when they saw the look on my face.
Wren was my family. My only fucking family.
One gunshot wound. To the stomach.
To the fucking stomach.
It had not hit the baby directly, they told me. But the massive trauma, the blood loss. There was no way a fetus could survive that.
Not a fetus. A little girl.
Our little girl.
“What’s wrong with Hudson?” Wren frowned at me from across the breakfast bar.
She was eating pickles while I made her mashed potatoes. She couldn’t get enough of them.
“I’m not naming my daughter after a river in New York that people dump bodies in,” I told her.
She screwed up her nose at me. “No fair! You don’t get to connect the names I choose with dead bodies. There won’t be anything left.”
She was out of surgery. Wren.
She would be okay, they said. A full recovery.
Without our child inside her.
They had her, the doctors said, the baby. For when Wren woke up. If she wanted to say goodbye.
That almost broke me. Right there and then. Split me apart. I’d peeled the skin off people’s bodies. I’d watched hundreds of people die.