Page 111 of Graceless

"Okay," she said, catching my shoulder, easy, like a woman who has caught a lot of shoulders. "Okay. Breathe. Sit back."

"Sorry."

"Don't be sorry, everybody does that." She sat down on the rolling stool then. "Here's what we've got. You've had a subchorionic bleed — a small collection of blood between the membrane and the uterine wall. Common in the first trimester, more common than most people think. Yours is small. The pregnancy is measuring right on target, the heartbeat is where it should be, and the bleeding has already slowed."

"So it's fine."

"So it's reassuring," she said, and I want to kiss that woman for the correction, because I would not have believed fine. "Most of these resolve on their own. Some don't. I can't promise you an outcome and I'm not going to."

"What do I do."

"Nothing dramatic. Rest — real rest, off your feet as much as you can manage for a couple of weeks. No lifting. Fluids. Warm. Stay out of the cold and off long walks." She was writing. "How far did you walk today?"

I looked at the wall.

"A mile and a half. In the rain."

She stopped writing.

"In March. In sleet." Her pen went down. She looked at me, and it was not a doctor's look; it was a woman's look, the one that goes around the room, and I watched her decide something. "Ms. Fontana, is there a reason you were walking a mile and a half in the freezing rain?"

The door was open. He was out in the hall — I couldn't see him, but I could feel the shape of him out there, the pressure, the same way you know which room the furnace is in.

"I was trying to get home," I said.

The doctor held my eyes for a second.

"Are you safe where you're staying?"

And there it was. The question they're trained to ask, the one with the whole machinery behind it, and all I had to do was say no.

I sat on that table with my hair wet and my hands shaking, and I thought about it. I actually thought about it. Because he had taken me. Because there was a stone house at the end of the island with no lock on the door and no way off the bluff, and a man outside it who had picked me up off a public road and moved me across a state line without asking, and every word of that is true, and none of it fits in a form.

What would I have said. He's not human, he's twenty feet from you, and if you send a deputy out there the deputy comes back with a very confused report and nothing else.

"I'm safe," I said. "I'm not staying there."

She wrote something anyway. Then she tore off the top sheet and handed it to me.

"Pelvic rest, which means what you think it means. Call the number at the top if the bleeding gets heavier, if it turns bright red again, if you get a fever, or if you get cramping that comes in a rhythm. Don't wait to see if it passes. Women wait. Don't."

"Okay."

"And one more thing." She stood, and her voice changed completely. "Do you have someone who can come get you? Someone who isn't the person standing in that hallway?"

"Yes," I said. "I do."

My phone said four percent. I took it out to the alcove by the vending machines where the old payphone housing still hangs on the wall, and I sat on the radiator and called Nina, because four percent is enough for one call if nobody rings long.

She picked up on the first tone. On the first.

"Caterina Anne Fontana⁠—"

"Nina."

"Four days. FOUR DAYS. I have been at your door twice, I have called Sal, I called the shop on Mulberry, I have a list of hospitals in my purse, in my purse, Cate, I wrote it out with a pen. I was going to the precinct tomorrow morning at nine o'clock⁠—"

"Nina, I need you to come get me."