I died for three minutes on my parents’ living room floor while my sister stood over me crying crocodile tears.
Chapter 2 - The Baby That Stopped Moving
I woke up to the sound of sirens and Ethan’s voice breaking.
The first thing I felt was the cold floor against my cheek. The second was the sticky warmth of blood in my hair. The third was the absence of something I had only just begun to love.
“Emily? Baby, stay with me. Please stay with me.”
Ethan’s hands were on my face, gentle but shaking. I tried to speak, but my tongue felt thick and heavy. The world tilted when they lifted me onto the stretcher.
I remember the paramedic’s face hovering above mine. I remember him pressing something against my stomach and going very still.
I remember the look he gave Ethan.
And then I remember nothing until the harsh white lights of the emergency room ceiling.
When I opened my eyes again, Ethan was sitting beside my bed, holding my hand so tightly it hurt. His eyes were red. His suit was stained with my blood.
“Ethan…” My voice came out cracked.
He looked at me like I had just come back from the dead.
“You stopped breathing for three minutes,” he whispered. “They had to restart your heart.”
I tried to sit up, but pain shot through my head and abdomen at the same time. Ethan gently pushed me back down.
“Don’t move. You have a concussion. And they… they had to do an ultrasound.”
The way his voice broke on the last word made my stomach drop.
I already knew.
But I still had to ask.
“The baby?”
Ethan’s jaw clenched so hard I thought his teeth would crack. He looked away for a second, then forced himself to meet my eyes.
“They couldn’t find a heartbeat.”
The words landed like stones.
I stared at him, waiting for him to say something else. Waiting for him to tell me the machine was broken or the doctor was wrong. But he just kept holding my hand, tears sliding down his face without a sound.
I turned my head toward the window and closed my eyes.
Madison’s face flashed behind my eyelids — the way she had smirked before kicking me. The way she had whispered that she could make it stop moving forever.
And my parents… standing over me while I bled, telling me to stop pretending.
A sound escaped my throat — something between a sob and a scream. Ethan climbed onto the narrow hospital bed and pulled me against his chest, careful of the wires and the IV.
“I’m going to kill her,” he said quietly against my hair. “I swear to God, Emily, I’m going to destroy every single one of them.”
I didn’t tell him to stop.
Because in that moment, with my baby gone and my head still throbbing from the table my sister had shoved me into, I didn’t want him to stop.
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I wanted them to feel what I was feeling.
I wanted them to understand that this time, there would be no one coming to save them.
