Chapter 14:

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His arms went around me, clumsy with panic.

“Iris, what’s wrong? I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to—don’t scare me.”

I let the laughter die on its own. It took a while. When it finally stopped, the room felt too empty, like a theater after the last person has left and the lights are still on.

So this was Stellan’s love. The months of indifference, the rejected calls, the slap, the blind devotion to a woman who’d engineered my suffering—all of that was love, in his accounting. He’d just been doing it badly, that’s all. An honest mistake. Easily corrected now that he’d identified the error.

I wiped my eyes with the heel of my hand and picked up the iPad from the bedside table. The screen was cracked at one corner from when it fell the other day, a web of lines radiating out from the point of impact. I found the file and held it out to him.

A diagnostic report.

“Stellan, if this is what you call love, maybe you should consider getting a robot as a nanny.”

I didn’t have Dagny’s talent for insults. This was the worst I could manage.

It was enough.

𝖳𝗁𝖾 𝖻𝖾𝗌𝗍 𝗋𝖾𝖺𝖽𝗂𝗇𝗀 𝖾𝗑𝗉𝖾𝗋𝗂𝖾𝗇𝖼𝖾 𝗈𝗇 𝗀𝖺𝗅𝗇𝗈𝗏𝖾𝗅𝗌.𝖼𝗈𝗆

Stellan read the report. I watched his hands first, because hands are harder to control than faces. They began to tremble at the second paragraph. By the third, the tremor had spread to his wrists, his forearms.

His eyes went red at the edges. He looked up at me. His mouth formed words that took a long time to arrive.

“This can’t be. Iris, please, tell me it’s not true…”

I didn’t change my expression. I didn’t help him.

Stellan’s knees hit the floor. He crawled the two steps to my bedside and grabbed the corner of my blanket with both fists, and what came out of him was not crying, exactly. It was the sound people make when language fails and the body has to take over. Raw, guttural, ugly.

This man. This brilliant, arrogant, careless doctor, kneeling on a hospital floor, gripping a cotton blanket like it was the only thing keeping him from drowning.

“Iris, I’m begging you, tell me this is a joke, that you’ve falsified this report to make me suffer. Please, Iris, tell me it’s not true!”

I smiled. It was the saddest thing my face had ever done.

“Stellan, you’re not wrong.”

“The accident took our child from us.”

The iPad slipped from somewhere—his hands, the bed, I wasn’t sure—and hit the floor. The screen shattered completely this time, a spiderweb of broken glass reflecting the fluorescent lights.

From Stellan’s throat came a sound that belonged in a place with no walls. He clung to me. His arms locked around my waist and his face pressed into the hospital gown at my side, and his whole body convulsed with a grief he hadn’t earned the right to feel.

I pressed the emergency call button.

The guards arrived quickly. It took two of them to pull Stellan away because he held on with the desperate strength of someone who knows, at the level of bone, that the moment he lets go, he loses everything.

They took him out. The door closed. The room was mine again.

Later, the doctor explained what I already suspected. The impact had crushed part of my abdomen. My uterus was damaged beyond repair. The child—a child I hadn’t known existed until it was gone—would be the only one I’d ever carry.

Dagny held my hand. She didn’t say anything wise or profound. She said:

“Don’t worry, Iris, I’ll always be with you. If you can’t have children, I won’t either. When we want to, we’ll adopt one. Today they’ll call me mom, tomorrow they’ll call you mom…”

It was absurd. It was the most comforting thing anyone had said to me in months.

I laughed, and the tears came with the laughter, tangled together, and I let them both happen without trying to sort out which was which.

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