Chapter 2 - The Sound of Sirens
The silence inside my chest felt heavier than the mud clinging to my legs.
I sat on the flooded dirt, both hands pressed against the swell of my stomach, waiting. Move, I prayed silently, staring down at my filthy, shivering skin. Please, baby. Move for Mommy.
Across the lawn, my husband—Julian—took two aggressive steps toward Claire. His voice lost its calm facade, turning ragged and mean. "Give me that phone, Claire. You don't know what she's like. She's crazy. She staged this!"
"Stay back!" Claire screamed, backing through her open gate and raising her arm high. "I have the dispatcher on speaker, Julian! The police are three blocks away!"
Julian didn't care. The sight of the recording timer ticking past forty-eight minutes on my screen drove him into a frenzy. He lunged across the grass, reaching for Claire’s arm, but his wet dress shoes lost traction on the mud-slicked lawn. He went down hard on his knee, cursing loudly.
That was when the first siren wailed in the distance.
The sharp, piercing screech cut through the humid evening air, growing louder with every passing second. Julian scrambled to his feet, his face pale, his eyes darting frantically between the open gate, the house, and me. The arrogance that had defined him for four years melted into raw, pathetic panic.
"You ruined everything," Julian spat, turning on me. He picked up the heavy wooden stick from the grass, his knuckles white. "You think they're going to believe you?"
He raised the stick, but before he could swing, two police cruisers swerved onto the driveway, tires screeching against the asphalt. Red and blue light strobed across the white fence and the garden bed.
"POLICE! DROP THE WEAPON! GET ON THE GROUND NOW!"
Officer Ramirez and his partner burst through the gate with sidearms raised. Julian froze, his arm still hoisted in the air with the wooden stick.
"Drop it!" Ramirez barked.
Julian let the stick fall into the mud. "Officer, wait! My wife is having a psychotic episode! She buried herself—"
Officer Ramirez didn't waste breath arguing. He stepped in, grabbed Julian's wrist, slammed him face-down into the wet grass, and pulled his arms behind his back. The metallic clack-clack of handcuffs snapping shut was the sweetest sound I had ever heard.
"You have the right to remain silent," the officer announced, forcing Julian to his feet.
"Claire!" I gasped, my voice barely a whisper as another wave of pain ripped through my lower abdomen. "The baby... she's not moving..."
Claire dropped to her knees beside me in the mud, ignoring the dirt ruining her clothes. She wrapped her jacket around my shivering shoulders. "Paramedics are right behind them, sweetie. Hold on! Just hold on!"
An ambulance backed down the driveway, its rear doors swinging open. Two paramedics rushed into the garden carrying a backboard and a trauma bag.
"We need to move her now," the lead paramedic, a woman named Sarah, called out. "She's hypothermic, and she's in active labor or experiencing placental detachment."
They carefully lifted my battered body onto the stretcher. As they rolled me out through the gate, I looked back once. Julian was being shoved into the back of a police cruiser, his eyes fixed on me with pure hatred.
Inside the ambulance, Sarah placed an ultrasound probe against my bare, mud-stained belly.
For three agonizing seconds, the monitor emitted only static.
Then, a faint, rhythmic sound echoed inside the small space.
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Thump-thump. Thump-thump. Thump-thump.
Tears broke through the dried mud on my cheeks. Her heart was beating. She was still fighting.
