He Used My Pregnancies to Cure His Mistress, So I Told Every Family novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Cold Room

Gina shows Elena the clinic's locked cold room and the lot photos, says the fourth baby was different, and is dragged off by Marco's men while Elena escapes through a bathroom window into Nico's arms.

Nico parked a block from Mulberry Street and did not argue when I said I was going in alone.

He looked at my torn palms, then at the dark window of the laundromat.

"I'll be across the road," he said. "If you come out running, I'll see it."

"And then?"

"Then I'll be there."

That was all.

I crossed the street with my hands wrapped in the sleeves of my coat.

The laundromat was open all night and smelled of bleach and hot lint.

One dryer was turning in the back, with nothing in it but a single blue sneaker.

A woman sat on the folding table beneath the change machine with a canvas bag in her lap.

She was in her forties, with short brown hair and reading glasses hanging on a cord.

She wore the cardigan I had seen over blue scrubs at the clinic for four years.

I had never learned her last name.

"Mrs. Barzini," she said.

"You held my feet," I said. "The second time."

"I did. I'm Gina."

Her face crumpled for one second, and then she pulled it back.

"I've worked nights at that clinic for twelve years," she said. "I'm sorry. I should have said something at the first one."

"Say it now."

She unzipped the bag and put a phone on the table between us.

The first photo was a steel door with a keypad.

The second was a handwritten label on a cooler lid: B-1 / 16 wks / S.C. next.

"The doctor calls it the cold room," Gina said. "It's off the third-floor corridor. Nobody goes in except him and one assistant."

"What was in the cooler?"

"What came out of you."

I held on to the edge of the table.

She went on, because she knew that if she stopped she would not start again.

She told me the doctor had a theory about cells from the placenta and the baby.

He said they could repair a damaged womb, if they came from a pregnancy the recipient's partner had fathered.

Marco had paid for the theory and paid for a lab in the clinic basement to test it.

"They needed the cells fresh," Gina said. "So they had to end the pregnancy at the right week, with living tissue. The doctor called it a managed loss."

"Managed."

"He wrote complication in the chart. Every time. You were sedated before you could ask."

I thought of the nurse saying breathe.

I thought of waking up with Marco's hand on my hair.

"Silvia had the injections in that room," Gina said. "Three days after each one. She cried every time, and she thanked the doctor every time."

"She thanked me," I said. "At dinner."

"I know. I heard."

"How?"

"Because I have a cousin on your mother-in-law's kitchen staff, Mrs. Barzini. I've been listening to that house for six weeks."

She pushed the phone toward me.

"All four lots are in here. Charts, labels, the transfer log. The doctor's signature and his."

"Whose?"

"Your husband's initials are on lot two."

I did not cry.

I looked at the washing machines and counted them, because it gave my eyes something to do.

Eleven.

"The fourth," I said. "She was twenty-seven weeks. The doctor said she never breathed."

Gina's hand went still on the bag.

"The fourth was different," she said. "I can't say it here. I'll tell you when you're out of New Jersey and Marco can't reach you."

"Why not here?"

"Because if I say it and he hears about it, someone dies."

"Who?"

"Please."

She took a roll of tape from the bag and fixed a small black drive under the lid of the nearest dryer.

"Copies," she said. "If they take my phone, they won't find that."

Headlights crossed the front glass.

Gina's eyes went past me.

A black Lincoln sat at the curb with its engine running, and then a second car pulled up behind it.

Four men got out in good coats.

I knew two of them.

They had stood behind my chair at Sunday dinner every week for seven years.

"Mulberry has a back hall," Gina said, very low. "Bathroom window. Go."

"Come with me."

"I'm the one they want. You're the one who has to be heard."

She pushed me toward the corridor.

The bell over the front door rang.

I ran.

The window above the toilet was small, and it stuck.

I got it up with both bleeding hands and my shoulder, and the frame came down on my forearm and tore my sleeve.

Behind me a man's voice said, "Evening, Gina. The Don would like a word."

I dragged myself over the sill and dropped into an alley full of bins.

I landed on my knees.

There was glass in my coat and blood on the cuff.

I heard a slap, a short cry, and the whole length of a dryer door being slammed.

Then footsteps came down the alley.

I turned with my hands up and a bin lid raised in front of me.

It was Nico.

He took the lid out of my hands.

"They have her," I said. "They have Gina."

His face did not change, but his eyes went to the alley mouth and measured it.

"Get in the car," he said.

"I left the drive in the dryer."

"Then I'll go back for it. Get in the car, Elena."

"You work for him."

He opened the passenger door and stood there in the cold with the engine running.

"Yes," Nico said. "And I'm going to get her back."

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