Chapter 2 - THE BABY’S HEARTBEATAt Mercy Regional, they cut the rest of my mud-soaked clothes away.
I remember monitors.
Warm blankets.
Needles.
A nurse cleaning soil from behind my ears while another drew blood.
I remember asking the same question so often that eventually a doctor placed one hand over mine and answered before I could speak.
“The baby has a heartbeat.”
I started crying.
Dr. Priya Shah from maternal-fetal medicine explained the situation carefully. I was severely dehydrated. My muscles showed signs of prolonged compression and stress. My left leg had nerve symptoms from remaining immobilized too long. My kidneys would need monitoring. I was having uterine irritability, but there was no immediate evidence of active labor.
“For now,” she said, “the baby is holding on.”
Holding on.
I understood that phrase.
I had been doing the same thing.
Deputy Cole arrived after midnight with Detective Rachel Kim from the county domestic violence unit.
They did not rush me.
They photographed the injuries the hospital documented. They collected the freezer bag and my phone under evidence procedures. They obtained the original emergency call recording from dispatch and asked permission to preserve my cloud backups.
“There should be multiple audio files,” I told them.
“How many?”
“I don’t know. Eight? Ten?”
Detective Kim leaned closer.
“What will we hear?”
“Mark. Diane. Mara.”
“Saying what?”
I swallowed.
“That I deserved it.”
She wrote something down.
Then she asked, “Why did they do this?”
That question was harder.
The simple answer was disobedience.
The real answer had begun months earlier.
Mark had become more controlling after I got pregnant.
He wanted access to my phone.
He wanted me to stop seeing my coworker Tessa because she “filled my head with feminist garbage.”
He wanted me to quit my accounting job after the baby came.
Then he demanded that my paycheck start going into the joint account his mother helped him manage.
I refused.
The arguments became rules.
Rules became punishments.
Sleeping on the couch.
Taking my car keys.
Turning off the Wi-Fi while I worked.
Then, four days before they dragged me into the backyard, I told Mark I was going to stay with my sister for a while.
He said I wasn’t taking “his child” anywhere.
The next morning, Diane came over.
Mara followed.
By sunset, they had decided I needed “a lesson.”
Detective Kim stopped writing.
“Has Mark ever physically restrained you before?”
“Not like this.”
“Has he ever described doing something similar to someone else?”
I thought about it.
Then an old memory surfaced.
Years earlier, early in our relationship, Mark had mentioned his first wife, Rachel.
He said she had been unstable.
He said she ran away after accusing his family of “crazy things.”
At the time, Diane had laughed and said:
“Some women can’t handle consequences.”
I opened my eyes.
“His first wife.”
Detective Kim looked up.
“What about her?”
“I don’t know.”
May you like
That was the truth.
But suddenly I wanted to.
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