When I came home late from work, my husband slapped me and screamed, “Do you know the time, you useless bitch? Get in the kitchen and cook for my mother!” I cooked for an hour, only for her to take one bite, spit it out, and shove me so hard I started bleeding—I knew I was losing the baby. I reached for my phone to call 911. My husband threw it away. I looked him in the eye and said, “Call my father.” They had no idea who he really was.
“Finally,” she sneered, not looking at me. “I was about to starve. The roast beef, medium rare. And the cream of mushroom soup from scratch. Don’t use that canned garbage.”
I nodded, tying the apron over my swollen belly. For the next hour, I was a ghost in my own kitchen, my movements a frantic dance of chopping, stirring, and searing. The world swam in and out of focus. I was dizzy, the metallic taste of blood on my tongue from where I’d bitten my cheek. All I could think about was the tiny life inside me, the fluttering kicks that felt more like desperate pleas.
Finally, the meal was ready. I served the roast beef to Dave and Mrs. Higgins, my hands trembling. I brought the soup last, placing a bowl before his mother.
She picked up her spoon, took a delicate sip, and then her face contorted in disgust.
“Too salty! Are you trying to poison me?” she shrieked, spitting a mouthful of hot soup onto the pristine white floor. “Useless trash, just like your farmer father.”
The insult to my dad, a man who had only ever shown them kindness, was the one thing that could still make me fight. “Don’t you talk about my father,” I whispered, my voice shaking with a rage I rarely allowed myself to feel.
Mrs. Higgins’s eyes widened in mock surprise. She stood up, her chair scraping loudly against the tiles. “Are you talking back to me, you pathetic little cow?”
She shoved my shoulder hard.
I was off-balance, exhausted, and my feet tangled beneath me. I fell sideways, my pregnant belly slamming into the sharp, unyielding edge of the granite countertop.
A pain I had never known—a searing, tearing agony—ripped through my core. It stole my breath, my sight, my sanity. I collapsed to the floor in a heap, a choked scream dying in my throat.
Then I felt it. A warm, terrifying liquid running down the inside of my leg. Red. So much red.
“Dave!” I cried out, my voice a shredded wreck. “Help me! Our baby… please, the baby!”
