He Traded Our Baby to Save His First Love novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Timed Before I Fell
Geneva wakes at 3 a.m. with her baby gone and her husband's signature on the form, and finds the form was timed before she reached the hospital.
I woke at 3 a.m. in a hospital bed, and my stomach was flat.
I pressed my hand on it before I opened my eyes.
Nothing pushed back.
A plastic bracelet on my wrist said WHITFIELD, GENEVA, and under it the word SURGICAL.
The nurse was at the foot of the bed, writing on a clipboard.
She saw my eyes open and her pen stopped.
"Mrs. Whitfield, you're awake. Would you like me to call your husband?"
"No," I said.
My voice came out flat and quiet.
She looked at the clipboard, then at me.
"The doctor will go over everything in the morning," she said. "But I'm so sorry about the pregnancy."
Ten weeks.
I had heard that heartbeat twice, in a dark room, at the clinic.
I had a black-and-white picture of it folded in my wallet.
I had carried it for eighteen days because I wanted to hand it to Nigel at the right moment.
There never was a right moment, so on Sunday I told him in the kitchen.
He was standing at the counter with his laptop open.
"Nigel, I'm pregnant."
He looked up.
For a second his whole face changed, and I saw the man I had married.
Then his phone lit up on the counter, and the name on it was Emmeline.
He turned it over and the face went away.
"The oncologist called," he said. "Emmeline's counts dropped again, Geneva. You're the only match in the registry. They want to start conditioning on Monday."
I had joined that registry once, on our second date, at a table outside a coffee shop.
Nigel had held my pen while I swabbed my cheek.
Since the wedding he had booked every checkup I ever had, and he had never missed one.
I knew what conditioning was. It was the chemo that clears out a patient's marrow so the donor's can take its place.
"The drugs they give me for the donation," I said. "They told me there's a fifty percent chance of losing a first-trimester pregnancy."
"I know."
"So I told them I'd donate after the baby is born. That's eight months, Nigel. She can wait eight months."
"She doesn't have eight months."
"Our baby doesn't have anyone else."
He looked at me, and his face had nothing in it at all.
"Geneva. It's a fifty percent risk. Emmeline is a hundred percent dead without it."
I had sent that woman flowers every Friday for a year.
White ranunculus, because she said the yellow ones made her tired.
I went to bed that night and told myself he was scared, and that he'd come around.
Tuesday evening I doubled over in the hallway with cramps I had never felt before.
I remember the floor tiles.
I remember Nigel's voice somewhere above me, and then the ambulance ceiling, and then nothing at all.
Now it was Thursday morning, and my baby was gone.
"Is there a form?" I asked the nurse. "Something I signed?"
"You weren't conscious, ma'am. Your husband signed as your proxy."
"Can I see it?"
She hesitated, then slid a page off the clipboard and set it on my blanket.
CONSENT FOR SURGICAL TERMINATION.
At the bottom, in the slanted blue handwriting that signed our mortgage, was Nigel Whitfield.
I looked at it for a long time.
"Where is he?" I said.
"He's been on six since last night, ma'am. Oncology."
Three floors up.
Emmeline's floor.
"He came down once, at midnight, and asked if you were stable," the nurse said. "Then he went back up."
I held the page close to my face, because the room was dark and the print was small.
Next to his signature there was a time.
4:10 p.m.
I read it again.
I had gone down in our hallway at 6:20 on Tuesday evening.
Two hours before I fell, my husband had already signed away our child.
"Nurse," I said, "what time did they bring me in?"
She checked the board.
"Six forty on Tuesday. The ambulance log says so."
"Then why does this say four ten?"
She didn't answer.
She took the form back and held it against her chest, and I watched her decide not to say what she was thinking.
"I would like a copy," I said. "And I would like my clothes."
"Mrs. Whitfield, you can't leave. You had surgery."
"Then I'll sign a paper that says I'm leaving. I'm good at it. My family has been signing things for me all week."
She went to get one.
My phone was in the drawer of the bedside table, and I called my sister before I did anything else.
Darby picked up on the second ring.
"Nor?"
"Come to St. Anne's," I said. "Third floor. Bring a coat."
"What happened?"
"I'll tell you in the car."
I eased my legs over the edge of the bed.
It hurt in a place I hadn't known I had.
I stood up anyway.
I did not go up to six.
I did not want to watch him hold her hand.
I wanted to know who had been in the room when he signed.
So I put the copy in my wallet, behind the picture, and walked out the door.
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