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Still she didn’t know how she was going to manage, in a studio apartment with a low-paying job. She hadn’t figured it out yet, but she would. Eventually. Now, however, her all of her fears fell away at the beautiful sight of her baby. Her baby.
The technician frowned and poked harder with the wand. Allegra winced. Then, more alarmingly, the technician put the instrument down and rose from her seat by the examining table where Allegra was lying.
‘I’ll be right back,’ she murmured, and then left the room.
Allegra lay there, shivering from the cold gel, her gently rounded belly damp and exposed. Unease crept icy fingers along her spine. Technicians weren’t supposed to leave in the middle of an appointment like that, surely?
She found out moments later when an important-looking doctor in a white lab coat followed the technician back into the room, frowning as she looked at the screen with the beautiful, fuzzy image of Allegra’s child.
‘What’s going on?’ Allegra asked, her voice high and strained with anxiety.
‘Just a moment please, Miss... Wells.’ The doctor glanced briefly at her file before turning her narrowed gaze back on the screen. Something was wrong. Allegra could feel it in her bones, in her frightened, hard-beating heart. Something had gone wrong with this pregnancy. With her baby.
She lay there, everything in her frozen and fearful, as the doctor took the wand and began to prod her belly once more, murmuring to the technician who murmured back, none of it audible to Allegra.
‘Please,’ she begged. ‘Please, tell me what’s going on.’
The technician gave her a smile of such sorrowful sympathy that Allegra wished she hadn’t asked. Then she handed her a paper towel to wipe off the gel while the doctor continued to study the image on the screen—the image of her baby.
‘Dr Stein will speak with you shortly,’ the technician murmured.
Moments later Allegra had all the answers she didn’t want. The words reverberated emptily through her, making horrible sense and sounding unintelligible, impossible, at the same time. Congenital heart defect were the three words that hurt the most.
‘But what does that mean exactly?’ she demanded, her voice shaking. She knew there were heart defects that were operable. There were even some that were asymptomatic, hardly worth mentioning. But looking at Dr Stein’s compassionate face, she feared her baby didn’t have one of those.
‘The particular defect we’re discussing is life-threatening,’ Dr Stein said quietly. ‘The baby wouldn’t live past a few months of age, if that.’ Allegra gaped and she continued, ‘We’ll order an amniocentesis as soon as possible, to know for sure what we’ll dealing with. This may take up to three weeks, I’m afraid. Based on the ultrasound, it could be one of several heart defects, of varying seriousness.’
‘But you think it’s a more serious one?’ Allegra whispered, and Dr Stein gave her an unhappy look.
‘I’m afraid that, yes, it’s looking like that, but we won’t know until we get the results of the amniocentesis. It’s difficult to diagnose this kind of condition from only a scan.’
Allegra walked home in a fog, barely aware of the steps that took her up to her sixth-floor studio. Anton poked his head out of his apartment to ask how she was, and Allegra didn’t even know what she said. The world felt muted, as if everything was taking place far away, to other people. Nothing mattered. Nothing at all mattered any more.
She lay on her bed, one hand pressed against her middle. Already, she’d barely been coping, stumbling through each day, trying to survive the awful morning sickness that had exhausted her so utterly. She hadn’t let herself think too much about the future, and now it looked like there might not be one. How was she going to wait three long weeks to find out?
And through the haze of her grief and fear, one fact kept coming back to torment her. She should have told Rafael. No matter how he had treated her, he should know she was pregnant with his child. He should be aware of what was happening.
Still she resisted. She didn’t want to give him a chance to reject her all over again, along with their baby. She didn’t want to face his accusations and anger, as he no doubt would be furious that she hadn’t told him she was pregnant. She especially didn’t want to open herself up to hurt.
