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Dex looked at me like I was crazy. “You don’t really want to know that.” “I do, I want to know.” I would never be able to live with not knowing.
Dr. Crawford had turned back to Dex, addressing him like he was the one in charge of my uterus. I wanted to grab his chin and force him to look at me, talk to me,
Dr. Crawford shook his head. “No, that’s not right…” he said, as though an ultrasound was something I might just forget. “She had one. I was here,” Dex added. Apparently, Dr. Crawford just needed to hear a man say it because he stopped shaking his head and frowned instead, staring at Dex like he’d just added something incredibly fascinating to the conversation.
Dr. Crawford stared at me with his lips very slightly parted, like he was so shocked he’d forgotten to close his mouth, and he kept his eyes on me for just long enough that I felt the beginnings of real dread building inside of me. What? What is it? Before I could say the words out loud, he excused himself, hurrying from the room so fast there was no doubt just how bad everything truly was.
Then, like he couldn’t hold it back anymore, he dropped his head to one hand and covered his eyes, shoulders slumping. Either crying or holding back tears, I couldn’t tell.
It was like a horrible catch-22: Keep doing the job that I loved, and I’d have to live in fear that I was a target forever. Stop doing it, and I might be sacrificing everything for nothing.
“I’d give anything to have her back. Anything.” “Anything,” Siobhan repeated, her voice soft, like she didn’t realize she’d said the word out loud.
Pregnancy hormones didn’t go away when your pregnancy did. It was like a really messed up parting gift.
I went to unlatch the lid, then froze. My hand was trembling, bourbon sloshing up against the sides of my glass. I felt like Pandora in the old Greek myth, like opening this box would unleash something terrible into the world, and a part of me didn’t care.
This was why I hadn’t wanted to let myself think about her, because it filled my body with so much anger that I didn’t have any room left for sadness.
“Abigail,” she breathed, coming closer. “What is it?” Her lady turned to her. Her eyes were crazed, rolling around in her head, the whites struck through with blood. “It is a monster,” she hissed, her chest heaving. “The baby…you must get rid of it!”
But I knew it wouldn’t matter. He could peel me off the floor and lead me upstairs, tuck me into our bed, and in the end, it wouldn’t make any difference. There was a part of me that would never leave the basement.
“Yeah, but why do you want a baby? Like, if you think about everything we’ve had to go through, all the rounds of IVF and the hormones, the miscarriage… Why are we wasting our time with it all? Life is short. Why can’t we just live our lives, be happy in the moment and all that crap?”
Though it was weird that Emily hadn’t mentioned she was in New York. Usually she tried to get me to meet her for a drink when she was in town. “Do you know why?” “I guess they didn’t think she could handle them after Kyle Holly publicly fired her.” I recognized the name Kyle Holly but couldn’t remember exactly why. He was a newer star, I think, the lead on some Netflix series. I had no idea why he’d fired Emily.
Midnight, I thought, feeling a chill. That meant she’d collapsed at roughly the same time I dropped to my knees in the basement. It meant she would’ve been lying on her floor, fighting for her life, at the exact same moment that I was lying in the basement, willing my dead baby to move.
Sometimes being alive hurt like hell.
Not a dead animal: me. I was looking down at my face on a doll’s plastic body. Staring at her, I felt all the oxygen leave my body.
I looked back down, my eyes moving from the doll’s face to her torso. Someone had drawn an X over her belly, thick angry lines made with red Sharpie. Staring at that X, I thought I knew what the message was: I’m not done with you yet.
“It was a Summer Day action figure with an X on her stomach. I think she left it for me. Like, as a threat.” Dex frowned and scrubbed a hand over his mouth, saying nothing for a long moment. I could feel his eyes on me, watching me. It annoyed me for a reason I couldn’t quite pinpoint. “What?” “It’s just that…anyone could’ve left a doll on the beach. You don’t know for sure that it was from the stalker, do you?”
Dude if her security guard was concerned, you should be too.
I didn’t want to be sent away, some woman verging on hysterical, too delicate for the harsh realities of life.
This was happening to me. I had a right to know what the cops had to say about it.
I only knew this because of a conversation back when Emily first started working as my publicist. She was telling me about how she used to intern at Warner Bros and saw some of my old dolls in their warehouse.
I am suspicious of Emily already having access to her calendar and their current address. Plus she was in town secretly.
I’d like to set you both up with burner phones later today so—” “Both of us?” Dex interrupted, frowning. “I’m sorry, why do you need my phone?” Kamal steadied him with a look. “Is that going to be a problem?”
Why what you hiding?
When Emily answered the phone, she seemed like she was in an amazing mood. “Anna, hi! How are you?” I hesitated for a second, taken aback. Emily didn’t sound like someone who’d just been given a huge slap on the wrist. Maybe Keagan had gotten things wrong.
The beach, I realized a moment later. I’d never told Emily that Talia’s house was on a private beach.
Told ya she's sus.
“This is going to work out for you,” I whispered, taking her hand. “I know it’s hard to believe that now, but it will. I promise.” It was the same thing she’d told me the night of my miscarriage. I wondered if she felt just as helpless saying the words to me then as I do saying them to her now.
I could tell I was getting on Dex’s nerves. He kept closing himself off in other parts of the house. He claimed he had to work, but I walked in on him once and he didn’t even have his computer open; he was just screwing around on his phone, either playing some dumb game or texting, I couldn’t tell. When he saw me, he set the phone down, fast, guilt on his face: a little boy caught messing around when he was supposed to be doing his homework.
He guilty for a whole different reason, trust me.
Something had moved. Inside of me. It wasn’t like what happened in the basement, that twitch. I wasn’t drunk. My belly had moved, all on its own, like something alive. I felt it. I saw it. No, not it. My baby.
“There are people who will take that baby away from you if you aren’t careful what you say, Judith.” Judith didn’t know what Maude could’ve meant by that. People who might take her baby away from her? She’d never heard of such a thing. It sounded like superstition. Like the boogeyman.
realized, a very tall woman with broad shoulders and dark hair. Her voice was deep and gravelly. “I’m here to help,” the woman told her. “I heard that you were desperate.”
“What I was going to say before you got so upset is that I’d be happy to help you find a psychotherapist. If you decide to pursue the pseudocyesis diagnosis once you calm down, please let me know.”
Why he so condescending and passive aggressive though?
It felt like he’d been gone forever, but I supposed it was only around thirty minutes or so.
Maybe he's not at the store
And—oh God—there was all the fruit and chocolate from the last publicity basket Emily sent me. So many opportunities for someone to slip me a pill, drug me. And I never would’ve known.
Did someone kill my baby? The stranger answered instantly, like she’d been waiting for this question all along: Are you sure it’s dead?
For days I’d been thinking she slipped me a pill to cause my miscarriage, but what if she’d done something much simpler: switched out my labs so that it looked like I’d miscarried even though I hadn’t, changed the results on my tests, messed with the ultrasound machine.
pool. I felt disgusted with myself, disturbed. I’d craved that dead raccoon. I’d wanted to… Not eat it. No. I would never. Would I?
“You felt that?” I asked, my voice cracking. “Oh yes,” she said, her hands still cupping my belly. “Feels like he wants out of there already.”
This moment was the culmination of twenty years of hard work, a lifetime of dreams. I should’ve been crying, bursting with pride and happiness. Instead, I was still thinking about how my baby had moved, how someone else had felt her move. How there was a chance.
I know things are…hard right now, but maybe this could be a silver lining? Now you have a little more time to focus on awards season.” For a moment I was so stunned I couldn’t speak. Did she really just tell me Maybe this could be a silver lining? What a thoughtless thing to say.
A seagull lay in the snow, neck broken. Its wing twitched once, twice. And then went still. Bad omen, I thought
Dex still hadn’t returned from the store when I got back to the house. I glanced at the time on my phone: he’d already been gone for over two hours.
I couldn’t stop thinking about that phone call, how Emily had sounded…off. And it wasn’t just excitement over the nominations—there was something else too. Some emotion she’d been trying to hide. Desperation. She needed me to win this Oscar.
stopped walking and looked down at the snowy sand, thinking about the doll I found on the beach. A doll I knew Emily had access to. Emily had access to my calendar too, I realized. I gave her my password so she could add events when she needed to. I’d totally forgotten about that. She could’ve been messing with my appointments all along, keeping me from getting pregnant so I could campaign for her. And there were the threats, the stalking—wasn’t all of it more reason for me to run off to LA? Right where Emily wanted me.
I frowned at him. Had he told me about this? I didn’t think so. It was weird enough that I would’ve remembered. Talia wanted a new tennis court so she just up and bought the place next door? This is the Hamptons. Even if the next-door property wasn’t quite as lavish as this one, I’d guess it was still a multimillion-dollar investment. And if Talia owned both properties, why would she have insisted we stay here instead of in her rental?
“I…think…” I managed to choke out. Then, gasping, “I think the baby broke my rib.”
“That, Ms. Alcott, is your baby,” Dr. Hill said, beaming like she was the one who’d conjured the baby back from the dead. Like she’d believed all along.
She felt it all, the whole operation. She felt fingers moving inside her, and she felt the exact moment when the doctor pushed her uterus back into her body, and she felt each prick of the stitches they put in her. All of it. She felt all of it.
