My voice sounds strange in my own ears.
She looks at me with an expression I cannot read at all the way through. Grief, maybe. Relief. Love. Fear.
“I knew it.”
I don’t know which part she means. The child. The war. The lie. The fact that some part of me must have known long before tonight and simply refused to say it aloud because making it real would have required changing everything.
Two hours pass. Then three.
I call no one except once, to have every kitchen in the house stripped and tested. Every tea tin, every jar, every staff member questioned. The food she touched. The water.
By hour four, I have replayed the last twenty-four hours so many times I can no longer tell which memory is real and which one my guilt has sharpened into something worse.
She was in my house. She ate under my roof. And someone still reached her. If I find out this came from inside my walls, there will be no negotiation left in me.
The doctor finally appears after what feels like a lifetime and a sentence all at once.
I know from his face that the news is mixed.
That is the worst kind.
He walks toward us with the chart held too tightly in one hand. I stand before he fully reaches me.
“Tell me.”
“The surgery is over,” he says.
I hold very still.
“We delivered the baby.”
For one split second, all the tension in me collapses inward so hard it almost feels like relief.
Delivered. My son. Alive.
Then I see the rest of it still sitting in the doctor’s face. “What’s wrong?”
He glances once at my mother, then back at me. “The baby is alive. He’s in neonatal care now. He came early, but he’s breathing with support and responding.”
Alive. Alive.
I seize onto that word and refuse to let go. “And Zatanna?”
The doctor’s mouth tightens. “She’s stable for now. We controlled the bleeding. But there is concerning news.”
My entire body goes cold. “Say it clearly.”
He nods once. Professional. Careful. Afraid enough not to waste my time. “We found signs during surgery that support what toxicology suspected. There are markers consistent with poisoning.”
My mother inhales sharply beside me.
I don’t move. I don’t blink.
I just feel something inside me harden into a shape I recognize too well. “Be sure,” I say.
“We will be when the final labs arrive,” he says. “But at this point, yes. We are treating this as poisoning.”
The corridor goes silent.
