Chapter seven

Evelyn's POV

I heard the door click,  his feet on the stairs, and then nothing. The house went silent; I lay there on Cherry's floor with my hand pressed to my stomach and my blood warm under my back, and I waited for the door to open again.

I counted. I did not mean to, but I counted, the way you count when your mind cannot hold anything bigger. One, two, three. My forehead was cold, and my arm would not lift properly, so I counted with my breath instead.

"Liam," I said, out loud, to the ceiling; the word came out thin and cracked. I pinched the skin on the back of my hand, hard, until it hurt, hard enough that a small red mark came up. I wanted it to be a dream; I wanted to wake up in my cold bed in that big house with the sun on the wall and the space beside me, and be angry about it, and be alive. I pinched again.

The pain was real, the blood under my back was real, and it was spreading. My husband had carried another woman out of this room in his arms and left me here. That was when the pieces came apart. I have read about hearts breaking. I thought it was a saying, like "cold as ice" or "raining cats and dogs." It is not, something inside my chest gave way, slow and quiet, like a shelf pulling out of a wall.

I felt all of me come loose at once. Three years of cold dinners and empty beds, three years of waiting by a locked door, three years of smiling in public and crying in the car, and every bit of it fell in one clean break. I did not scream cause there was no air for it.

With my hand on my stomach, I told the little one inside me "I'm here, I'm still here please stay with me." My phone was somewhere on the floor. I found it by dragging my elbow along the marble, an inch at a time, and my fingers closed on the cold case. My screen was cracked from the fall. Margaret's name was at the top, and I pressed it.

"Ev?" She answered on the second ring. "Ev, what is it?"

"Margaret." My voice did not sound like mine. "Come get me. Please."

"Where are you? Evelyn, talk to me."

"Fifth. The glass tower." I stopped and let the pain pass through me. It came low and deep and pulled at me from the inside. "Cherry's floor I'm on the floor."

I heard a chair scrape. "I'm in the car. I'm coming. Do not hang up. Do you hear me? Do not hang up." Her voice broke, then got hard, the way she gets when she is scared.

"Listen to me. Keep your hand there. Keep it pressed, and keep talking to me. Tell me what you see." I told her the ceiling. I told her the white lamp and the glass table and the shards by my foot.

She kept saying, "Good. Good. Keep going. I'm at the lights now. Two minutes, Ev. Two minutes." I waited ten minutes, fifteen my thoughts went soft and strange. It was hard to find the words Twenty. "Margaret."

"I'm here. I'm in the elevator. Don't stop talking."

"I think he's not coming back."

She did not answer right away. Then she said, very quietly, "Then he doesn't deserve you, and Thirty minutes after Liam walked out of that door, I heard the elevator open.

Margaret did not slow down. She came around the corner with her bag in one hand and stopped, and her face did something I had never seen before fear. She went on her knees beside me with her hands on my face.

"Okay," she said. "Okay. I've got you. You're going to be fine."

"Cherry cut herself," I said. "I watched her do it. He didn't..."

"I know," Margaret said. "I know. Don't talk."

She put her arm under my shoulder and lifted me. Halfway to the elevator, she took off her jacket and pressed it to my head. In the elevator, she pressed both her hands to my stomach and looked up at the numbers and said, "Come on. Come on. Come on."

I could hear her on the phone in the car. "I need an ambulance to meet me. Twenty minutes out. Pregnant, bleeding, possible head injury. Meet me at the doors."

The city went by in pieces. A red light., white van the Denver skyline, standing up bright and easy, like it knew nothing. I turned my head on the seat and saw the tail lights spread out and smear, and I closed my eyes.

Please. That was all I had. Please let me live. Please let my baby live. Let me be wrong about the thought of losing my baby. I went back through my life like flipping through a sketchpad. Ethan at six, laughing on my shoulders. My mother's hands tying my shoes.

Liam at sixteen in the school hallway, kneeling down in front of me with tape in his hand, fixing the split in my shoe when the others were laughing. "Don't listen to them," he said. He looked up and smiled I loved him from that hallway. 

The car stopped hard. Doors opened. Cold air, and then lights above me, very white, and hands. So many hands.

"She's with us," someone said. Margaret's face came over mine. She looked scared and wild, while holding my hand. "We're here. We're at the hospital. Ev, stay with me, we're at the hospital."

"I'm here," I said. "I'm..." The lights above me bent, and the ceiling came down, and the voices went far away and soft, like they were coming from another room. The last thing I felt was Margaret's hand squeezing mine so hard it hurt.

Then everything went out.