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“Murderous.”
“Because?”
“Because it wouldn’t be right, dammit!”
“But it’s okay that it happened to you because you’re a male?”
I opened my mouth to answer her, but nothing came out.
Fuck.
“I…” Shaking my head, I hissed out a growl. “I see what you’re doing here, Doc, and it won’t work.”
“You have been let down and taken advantage of in terrible ways,” she continued. “I understand why you refuse to consider yourself a victim, and whether I agree or not, I respect your narrative, but I need you to accept that what happened to you was not acceptable and a serious breach of trust and consent.”
124
Birth Plans
AOIFE
“So, you’ve hit the twenty-eight-week mark,” the doctor mused, wiping the gunk off my belly when she was finished scanning me. “How are you feeling?”
“On the way over here, we drove past a field with a pregnant pony in it,” I told her as she helped pull me off the examination table so that I could adjust my clothes. “I swear, that poor pony was wider vertically than she was long horizontally.” I blew out a breath and padded back to the desk. “So, yeah, I feel like that pony.”
“Aoife,” Mam chastised from her chair.
“What?” I huffed, lowering myself down on the seat next to my mother. “She asked.”
Smothering a laugh, I watched as the doctor flicked through my maternity folder, scribbling and jotting down notes as she went. “You’ll come back to see us at thirty-two weeks, and again at thirty-six weeks. After that, you’ll come biweekly until thirty-eight weeks when you’ll come weekly until you deliver.”
Deliver.
Jesus, that was a scary word.
“Have you discussed your birth plan with a midwife?”
“Yeah.” I squirmed in my chair, feeling a sudden spark of panic rise up in me. “I’ve been through the plan.”
“And you’ve chosen your birth partner?”
“Me,” Mam interjected. “I’ll be going with her when she delivers.”
“No.” I rolled my eyes. “My boyfriend will be coming with me.”
“Aoife.” Mam’s eyes filled with concern. “We don’t know if he’ll be back by then.”
“He’ll be back,” I confirmed, turning my attention to the doctor. “Joey Lynch,” I said, pointing at my file. “You can jot that down. He’s my birth partner.”
125
Breakthroughs and Begging
JOEY
“Come on, Joey,” the good doctor coaxed as she sat opposite me in my own personal prison cell. Yeah, we had moved on from Joseph to Joey, and Dr. Bianca Rushton to Dr. B, or just plain Doc. “We have another forty-five minutes of our daily session left. You’ve been doing so well at articulating your feelings. Don’t clam up now.”
Jesus, she was a demon of a woman.
