He looked annoyed.
“It hurts.”
Sylvia stood so fast her chair scraped the floor.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake.”
She followed me into the kitchen, closing the swinging door behind her with a slap.
The warm golden dining room disappeared, replaced by fluorescent kitchen light, dirty pans, and steam clouding the windows.
I bent over the island, breathing through my teeth.
“Sylvia, please,” I said.
“Something is wrong.”
Her face twisted.
“Something is always wrong with you when work needs doing.”
“I need a doctor.”
“You need to stop humiliating my son.”
I tried to move around her toward the hallway where my purse was hanging on a chair.
She stepped in front of me.
“I’m calling—”
“No, you’re not.”
Her hands hit my shoulders.
The shove came so fast I had no time to protect myself.
My lower back struck the granite edge of the island.
The shock of it stole the air from my lungs.
I slid down, one hand clamped under my belly, the other clawing at the cabinet handle.
Then the pain changed.
It was not an ache anymore.
It was tearing, white-hot, terrifying.
I looked down and saw red spreading across the white tile.
For one second, my mind refused to understand it.
Then I screamed.
“My baby.”
The kitchen door burst open.
David came in first, followed by his father and two guests.
Sylvia stood frozen near the island, her hands half-raised, as if she could push the moment back into silence.
David saw the floor.
He saw me.
And the first thing that crossed his face was not fear.
It was fury.
“God, Anna,” he snapped.
“What have you done?”
I reached toward him with shaking fingers.
“Call 911.”
The judge from dinner appeared behind him, pale and stunned.
“David,” the judge said, “call an ambulance.”
But David’s eyes flashed toward the hallway, toward the guests, toward the perfect Christmas tableau cracking open behind him.
“No,” he said.
The word dropped into the room like a stone.
“No?” I whispered.
He crouched and grabbed my phone from where it had fallen near my hip.
I tried to reach for it.
“David, please.”
He stood and hurled it against the wall.
The screen shattered on impact.
A woman gasped from the doorway.
“No ambulance,” he said, low and vicious.
“No police.
The neighbors will talk.
I just made partner, and I’m not letting you destroy everything because you can’t control yourself.”
Something in me went very still.
Maybe it was shock.
Maybe it was the part of me that had grown up watching my father in courtrooms, watching him become calm when everyone else became loud.
David leaned closer.
His voice dropped so only the people nearest could hear.
“I am a lawyer.
I know how this works.
I play golf with the sheriff.
If you say my mother touched you, I’ll say you fell.
I’ll say you’ve been unstable since the pregnancy.
I’ll have doctors saying you’re hysterical before morning.”
Tears slid down my temples into my hair.
He smiled.
“You’re an orphan, Anna.
Who is going to believe you?”
That word landed exactly where he meant it to.
Orphan.
That was what he had told people.
That my parents were gone.
That I had no family worth mentioning.
That I was grateful he
