He Let Our Baby Die Over a Hospital Bill novel · Chapter 1 of 32
Chapter 1: Six O'Clock
In labor at a private birth center, Nadine's card freezes at six and her husband Holden refuses the ambulance to save eighteen hundred dollars; their daughter dies, Nadine has his refusal put in her chart and throws him out, then finds the baby fund paid for his assistant's apartment that morning, split fifty-fifty.
My husband kept score in bed.
"Forty-one, forty-two," Holden murmured into my shoulder. "That's twice you started it this week, babe. I'm putting it on your side."
Then he rolled over, picked up his phone and logged it.
Holden built EvenUp, the money app for couples.
Love is a fair split. Two million couples paid him to keep their score.
We were the couple in the ads.
When I cried, he'd kiss my hair and say, "I'm not being cheap. I'm respecting you."
So we split dinners. We split gas. We split the toilet paper.
At city hall he held his phone out before the clerk had even stamped our license.
"Seventeen fifty, babe. Your half."
I was twenty-six. I thought it was a joke.
Three years later I was on my back in a birth suite on Seventeenth Avenue, nine centimeters along, and the joke was still going.
The door opened at one minute past six.
Kaylin Shumway, Holden's assistant, came in with her tablet held up.
"Holden, the suite deposit still isn't paid. Four thousand. It's 6:01."
The midwife looked up from the foot of the bed.
A contraction took me, and I held the rail until my knuckles went white.
"Can it wait until she's here?" I said.
Holden came in behind Kaylin, still on a call, and finished it first.
"Nadine, six o'clock is reconciliation. You know that. It isn't personal."
"The deposit was coming out of the baby fund. You said so."
"The fund's handled. This is your half."
I reached for my phone on the tray to pay it.
Then I remembered.
Yesterday I'd asked him why Kaylin's name was on a listing for a three-million-dollar apartment.
At six o'clock last night the app said I owed four hundred and twelve dollars, and my card froze.
I opened my bank app anyway.
$3.50.
"I can't," I said. "You froze me."
Holden sighed at waiters.
"Then we'll go to the county. They take everybody. It's fourteen minutes."
The midwife stood up.
"She's at nine. The baby is low. Nobody is moving her."
"We're not paying four thousand dollars for a room with a bathtub."
"Then I'm calling an ambulance."
She was already dialing.
"An ambulance is eighteen hundred dollars," Holden said. "We have a car."
The midwife held the phone to her ear and looked straight at him.
"I'm writing down that you refused it."
He smiled at her.
"Write it."
They put me in the back of his black SUV in a hospital gown and a towel.
Kaylin drove. Holden sat up front and answered emails.
At 6:08 he made a short call. I didn't hear a word of it over my own noise.
Colfax was a mile of red brake lights.
Halfway down it, I felt something slip out of me that wasn't water.
I didn't know what it was. I knew it was wrong.
"Holden. Something came out. Something's wrong."
"We're almost there. Breathe through it."
"Run the light," I begged Kaylin.
She looked at Holden in the mirror.
He shook his head. "Tickets go on the household account."
At 6:38 we pulled into the ambulance bay of the county hospital.
A big man in navy scrubs yanked my door open before the car had stopped.
He took one look and shouted for a gurney.
Then he put on a glove and climbed in beside me.
"I'm Abe. I've got her. Don't push. Whatever happens, don't push."
He rode the gurney on his knees all the way to the operating room, his hand holding my daughter up off her own cord.
The last thing I saw before the mask was his face.
He was counting under his breath too.
When I woke up it was dark, and my body was empty.
Abe was sitting beside the bed. My blood was on his sleeve.
He didn't make me ask.
"I'm so sorry, Nadine. We got her out at 6:51. We couldn't bring her back."
I asked to hold her.
He brought her in a white hospital blanket with a pink and blue stripe.
She had Holden's long fingers and my chin.
Somebody had written her weight on a card. Seven pounds even.
Abe stood by the door and didn't say one soft thing, and I was grateful.
At nine the door opened. Holden came in, and Kaylin came in behind him with two coffees.
He looked at the blanket, then at the monitor, then at me.
"Babe. I'm sorry. This is awful."
He touched my foot through the sheet.
"We'll settle the hospital split once we know what insurance covers. Don't think about it tonight."
Kaylin took a sip of her coffee.
Something in me went cold and very clear.
"Abe," I said. "Are you my nurse?"
"Tonight I am."
"Then put this in my chart. My husband refused an ambulance at the birth center to save money. The midwife wrote it down. I want it written down here too."
The charge nurse had come to the doorway.
Holden turned to her with his reasonable face.
"She's on a lot of medication. She doesn't know what she's saying."
"I know exactly what I'm saying," I said. "I want a divorce. And I want him out of my room."
Abe was already standing. He was a head taller than Holden.
"You heard her, sir."
The charge nurse picked up the phone on the wall and called security.
Holden didn't argue. He never argued in front of people.
He straightened his glasses and walked out between two guards, and Kaylin followed him with both coffees.
At midnight I opened EvenUp to see what I had left to bury my daughter with.
The baby fund. Eleven thousand six hundred dollars. Half of it was mine, saved out of groceries for eight months.
Balance: $0.00.
One transfer, that morning, at 9:14.
Escrow deposit. Unit 21B, Larimer Street. Buyer: Kaylin Shumway.
Under it, in the little gray letters the app used for everything, it said: Split 50/50.
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