It was an ultrasound reading that had been done in tandem with the scans to check her pelvic region. “You told the triage nurse your wife couldn’t get pregnant. You told my staff that her infertility was a source of stress,” the doctor said, his voice dropping to a terrifying whisper of his own.
“Your wife isn’t infertile, Daniel. She is eighteen weeks pregnant.” The room completely stopped. The buzzing of the hospital monitors faded into background noise. I felt the air leave my lungs. Eighteen weeks? How could that be possible? The negative tests… “She is carrying a perfectly healthy baby boy,” Dr. Aris continued, delivering the final, crushing blow.
“And the only reason she hasn’t been showing, and the reason her hormones have been wildly fluctuating, is because someone has been tampering with her diet. Blood tests show massive, toxic levels of a holistic, unprescribed abortifacient—an herbal compound designed to induce miscarriages and mask pregnancy hormones.” Daniel stood completely petrified, paralyzed by the sheer weight of the information crashing down on him.
A son. He finally had the son he had been torturing me over. But the realization of the poison shifted the entire dynamic of the room. I looked at Daniel, and for the first time in our marriage, he looked as horrified as I was.
He didn’t poison me. I knew he didn’t. He wanted a child too badly. There was only one person who made my meals, steeped my morning tea, and desperately wanted our marriage to end because I wasn’t “good enough” for her precious boy. His mother.
“My mother…” Daniel breathed out, his knees physically buckling as the reality of his mother’s betrayal hit him. She had been poisoning her own grandchild just to get rid of me. “I don’t care who brewed the tea, and I don’t care who pushed her today,” Dr. Aris said coldly, stepping toward the curtain and pulling it entirely open.
Standing right outside our bay were two uniformed police officers. “I am mandating a psychiatric hold and an immediate domestic violence intervention for the mother and the child,” the doctor stated, looking at the officers. “And this man is no longer allowed within five hundred feet of my patient.” As the officers stepped forward to detain a sobbing, shattered Daniel, I laid my head back against the hospital pillow.
My abdomen still ached, and my heart was pounding, but for the first time in five years, the suffocating Phoenix heat was gone. I placed a trembling hand over my stomach, closing my eyes. I was battered, I was broken, but I wasn’t empty. And more importantly, I was finally free.
