I sat very still, the water bottle pressed against my lips, staring out the windshield at nothing.
When was my last period?
I tried to think. Tried to count backward. But the weeks had been blurring together lately—between the bakery and Thad and everything with Zainab, I’d lost track of time completely. I couldn’t really remember the last one.
My hand drifted to my stomach.
The nausea. The exhaustion I’d been chalking up to long hours at Sweet Zin. The way certain smells had been hitting me different lately—the coffee at the bakery making me gag when I used to love it. The tender breasts that I’d blamed on my cycle.
A cycle I couldn’t remember having.
I put the car in park. Sat there on the shoulder of the road with the hazards clicking and the night pressing in around me.
I needed to take a test.
39
ZAINAB
Beeping.
That was the first thing I registered. Steady, rhythmic beeping that pulled me out of the darkness like a rope dragging me up from somewhere deep and black and silent. My eyelids were heavy, cemented shut with exhaustion, and every single part of my body felt like it had been dismantled and put back together by someone who didn’t read the instructions.
I tried to move my right hand and felt the resistance immediately. Cold metal biting into my wrist when I tugged.
Handcuffs.
My eyes flew open and the world assembled itself in pieces—white ceiling tiles, fluorescent lights humming overhead, the sterile smell of antiseptic and fresh linen. An IV line snaking from a bag into the back of my left hand. A heart monitor pulsing beside me, the source of that rhythmic beeping. Hospital-grade blankets tucked around a body that felt hollow and deflated in a way I’d never experienced before.
My belly. I looked down.
It was a tiny bit flatter and much less firm.
The babies.
Everything came rushing back in a flood of sensory memory that nearly drowned me. I remembered the phone bank, Mehar’s voice, the contraction that split me in half. Cooper dragging me back to the cell. LaLa’s face above me, fierce and determined. The pushing. The screaming. The first cry. And then LaLa’s eyes going wide, “there’s another one,”and the second cry, deeper, stronger, a sound I didn’t expect because nobody told me there would be two.
Twins.
I had twins.
But where were they? I jerked upright and the handcuff yanked me back hard enough to bruise, the metal edge cutting into the bone of my wrist. Pain exploded through my lower body and it was deep, throbbing, the kind of pain that reminded you your body had just done something extraordinary and was not going to let you forget it anytime soon. My inner thighs ached, my abdomen felt like it had been hollowed out with a spoon, and there were thick pads between my legs that told me I was still bleeding.
No bassinets in the room. No incubators. No tiny humans swaddled in hospital blankets. Just me, alone, handcuffed to a metal railing, in a room that was lonely and quiet.
My eyes burned. The tears erupted before I could stop them. They slid down my temples into the pillow because my one free hand wasn’t enough to wipe them all.
A guard sat in a chair outside my door. I could see him through the narrow window. He was young, stocky, scrolling his phone, not even pretending to care that a woman was crying fifteen feet away from him. At least it wasn’t Cooper. At least it wasn’t the blonde bitch with the too-tight ponytail. Small mercies.
I looked for a phone. A landline. Anything.
Nothing. No phone on the nightstand. No phone mounted to the wall. Just the monitor, the IV, and a plastic call button clipped to my blanket.
I pressed it.
Less than a minute later, the door opened and a nurse walked in. She was maybe fifty, brown-skinned, with short silver locs and a kind face. Her name tag read ELISE, and when she saw me awake, she smiled, showing her entire Colgate white smile.
“There she is.” She came to my bedside and checked my IV, her movements gentle and unhurried. “How are you feeling, sweetheart?”
