Chapter 2 - WHAT THE DOCTOR SAID NEXT
By two in the morning, I knew exactly how close we had come.
The doctor’s name was Dr. Leland. He was kind, tired, and careful with every word. He explained that my body temperature had dropped dangerously low, the contractions I started having on the balcony were real, and the partial placental separation meant my baby had been deprived of oxygen long enough to put us both in immediate danger.
“You’ll be admitted for monitoring,” he said. “Strict bed rest for now. We’re going to work very hard to keep you pregnant for several more weeks.”
“How many?” I asked.
“As many as your body will allow safely.”
Alejandro sat beside my bed, pale and rigid, his elbows on his knees, both hands clasped so tightly I thought he might injure himself. He had not let go of my coat since the ambulance. My thin wool maternity coat—still cold when the paramedics pulled it from the chair beside the balcony door.
The coat his mother noticed hanging beside the front door.
The coat that finally proved I could not have “gone to lie down,” the way Paola had told everyone.
Officer Jenna Ramirez arrived before sunrise.
She was practical and unsentimental, exactly the kind of person I needed. She took my statement first, then Alejandro’s, then asked if she could photograph my reddened hands, the bruises forming on my knees, and the scrape across my palm where I fell on the concrete.
“Did she have any reason to believe you were medically vulnerable?” she asked.
“I’m twenty-eight weeks pregnant,” I said.
“Yes, but I’m asking whether she knew you’d already been having symptoms tonight. Pain, swelling, exhaustion.”
“She mocked them all evening.”
Officer Ramirez wrote that down without reaction.
“And the camera footage belongs to you?”
“To us,” Alejandro said. “It stores automatically in the cloud.”
That seemed to matter.
Paola, meanwhile, had refused to leave the hospital at first. She stayed in the hallway, telling anyone who would listen that the balcony door sometimes “stuck” and that I had a habit of “overreacting.” Alejandro’s mother, Teresa, cried and said this Thanksgiving had turned into a tragedy no one could have predicted.
But Officer Ramirez had already watched the video once with Dr. Leland.
She wasn’t interested in Teresa’s version.
Before she left, she told us two things.
First, the camera footage would be formally preserved.
Second, Paola was being asked not to leave the county while they completed the initial investigation.
Alejandro stared at the door after the officer left.
“She did it on purpose.”
It wasn’t a question.
“No,” I said. “She did worse than that.”
He looked at me.
“She watched me collapse.”
May you like
That was the moment something changed in his face.
And I knew the excuse he had repeated for months—That’s just Paola—was finally dead.
