The first thing my husband did when he saw the blood was complain about the floor.
Silas Vale stood at the bathroom door in a pale linen blazer, his overnight bag hanging from one shoulder, his hair still damp from a shower he had taken while I sat on the tile trying not to pass out. Behind him, through the open bedroom door, our ten-day-old daughter slept in a white bassinet beneath a mobile of wooden moons.
I had one hand pressed between my legs and the other gripping the cabinet handle. A towel lay twisted under me, already too dark, already too heavy.
‘Silas,’ I said, and even I could hear how thin my voice had become. ‘Something is wrong.’
He looked past my face to the streak across the limestone.
‘Mara, I just had that sealed.’
For one second, I thought I had misunderstood him. Ten days earlier, I had given birth to June after nineteen hours of labor and an emergency repair that left me moving like an old woman. My body still felt borrowed, fragile, stitched together with pain and adrenaline. The nurses had warned me to call if the bleeding became heavy again, if I felt faint, if my pulse raced, if anything felt wrong.
Everything felt wrong.
‘I need to go back to the hospital,’ I whispered.
Silas closed his eyes, not in fear, but in frustration. Outside, a car horn tapped twice from the street. His driver was waiting. His thirty-first birthday weekend was beginning without him, and to Silas, that was a greater emergency than the blood soaking my pajama pants.
He had called the trip a founders retreat whenever I looked worried. In private, it was a birthday celebration at a vineyard hotel in Napa with investors, old college friends, and a chef whose name he kept saying as if it were a prayer. He had bought new sunglasses for it. He had scheduled a massage. He had chosen the caption for his first post before he packed his socks.
‘I cannot do this right now,’ he said.
The words landed colder than the tile.
I tried to stand and failed. The cabinet handle jerked under my weight. A bolt of pain tore through my abdomen, and black dots swarmed across my vision.
‘Silas, please. Call Ruth. Call Tessa. Call 911. I do not care who.’
Ruth Alvarez was the postpartum nurse who had visited twice after June came home. She had a calm voice, a blunt manner, and hands that seemed to know exactly what to do before anyone asked. My sister Tessa lived six blocks away and had offered to sleep on our sofa every night since the birth. Silas had refused both women with the same polite smile.
We need space as a family, he had said.
What he meant was, I need no witnesses.
Now he crouched in front of me, careful not to let his trousers touch the floor. For a breath, relief moved through me. I thought he had finally seen me.
Instead, he picked up my phone from the sink ledge.
‘What are you doing?’ I asked.
‘Checking the airline app. My boarding group changed.’
His thumb moved over the screen. I was too weak to reach for it. He typed quickly, his jaw
