Page 110 of Graceless

CATE

He got us there in under a minute and I have no memory of the air at all. What I remember is the parking lot lights coming up out of nothing, and him setting me on my feet by the emergency doors, and me grabbing two fistfuls of his shirt because the ground wasn't finished arriving yet.

"Listen," I said. "Right now. Listen."

He went still. That total stillness, the one that isn't a man being quiet, the one where something enormous turns all of itself toward a single point.

"It is there," he said.

"You're sure."

"It is there, Caterina. It is quick, and it is steady, and it has not changed since the house."

And I stood in a hospital parking lot in the last of the afternoon light holding a fallen angel's shirt in both fists and did not believe him.

He told me the truth in the flat voice — the true voice, the one I've staked my life on — and my whole body said: he lied to you on a beach about this exact child, with that exact voice.

"I need a machine," I said. "I'm sorry. I need a machine to tell me."

Something went across his face that I will be paying for the rest of my life.

"Yes," he said, and opened the door for me.

The ultrasound tech had cold hands and a wedding ring she'd taped over with surgical tape, and she talked the entire time about nothing — her daughter's tuition, the parking situation, a wedding she was going to Saturday — and she would not tell me one thing that mattered.

"The doctor will go over everything with you."

"Is there a heartbeat."

"The doctor⁠—"

"I know there's a heartbeat. I'm asking you to say it."

She moved the wand. The screen was angled away from me, gray static with shapes moving in it, and I lay on that table in a paper gown with my hair still wet and watched a stranger's face for information she'd been trained not to give me.

Her eyebrows moved. Just barely. Up, and then level.

"The doctor will be right in," she said, and put her hand on my ankle for one second on her way out, which is how I knew he'd been telling the truth.

A nurse came through with a clipboard and a cardboard cup of water.

"You're at Southampton, hon, in case nobody told you. Your husband carried you into that lobby like the building was on fire."

"He's not my husband."

"Mm." She put the cup in my hand. "He's parked in that hallway like a fire hydrant either way. You want me to move him?"

"No."

And I lay there in a paper gown on crinkling paper and was aware of him through the wall the way you're aware of weather — twelve feet away, facing my door, burning. I have spent three days building a case against that man and every exhibit is true, and none of it changed the plain animal fact that with him in the hallway I could put my whole attention on the machine, because nothing on this earth was coming through that corridor. Wanting him and wanting him gone had stopped being opposites somewhere on that bluff. I didn't have room to fix it. I let both be true and drank the water.

Southampton. Which meant the nearest hospital with a maternity floor. Which meant that somewhere in three days of standing in the dark outside a stone cottage, he had looked it up.

The doctor was forty-something and brisk and had my chart and did not sit down.

"So. First — there's a heartbeat. It's a good strong one."

The room went sideways anyway. Knowing it and hearing a woman with a chart say it are two different things. I heard the cup hit the floor.