and sometimes after dinner.
“How often?” Angela asked.
Sophie looked at Claire.
Claire nodded.
“Tell her.”
“Most days,” Sophie said.
Angela’s expression shifted only slightly, but Claire saw it.
“Any fever?”
“Sometimes at night.”
“Any recent injury?”
Sophie shook her head.
“Any surgeries?”
“No,” Claire said.
Angela typed.
“None ever? Appendix? Hernia repair? Accident?”
“No surgeries.
She broke her wrist when she was ten, but that’s it.”
Sophie frowned.
“What about the car crash?”
Claire turned to her.
“What car crash?”
Sophie blinked.
“The one when I was little.
With the snow.
I don’t remember much.
Daniel said you didn’t like talking about it.”
Claire felt a small, cold tap behind her ribs.
The winter accident.
She remembered it in fragments.
Headlights sliding across ice.
Sophie’s scream.
A white burst of airbag.
The taste of blood.
Daniel’s voice from somewhere far away saying, Stay still, Claire, help is coming.
After that, memory dissolved into hospital lights and headaches.
She had woken the next morning with Daniel beside her bed.
Sophie had been asleep in a chair, a bruise blooming along her cheekbone.
“They checked her,” Daniel had said.
“She’s lucky.
Bruised ribs.
Nothing serious.”
Claire had been concussed, grieving still, medicated, and terrified.
She had believed him because she needed someone in the world to be steady.
Nurse Angela was watching her.
Claire swallowed.
“There was an accident.
Eight years ago.
I was told she didn’t need surgery.”
Angela typed more slowly.
A physician assistant examined Sophie first.
Then a doctor came in.
Dr.
Mercer was in his late forties with tired eyes and a calm, unhurried manner that made Claire feel both safer and more afraid.
He pressed gently along Sophie’s abdomen.
When he reached the lower right side, Sophie sucked in a breath and grabbed Claire’s wrist.
Dr.
Mercer stopped immediately.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“I know that hurts.”
Sophie nodded, tears shining but not falling.
He straightened.
“I want blood work, urine, and imaging.
We’ll start with ultrasound.
Depending on what we see, we may send you to the emergency department for CT.”
Claire nodded before he finished.
Her phone vibrated again.
Daniel.
She silenced it.
The ultrasound room was dim and cold.
Sophie lay under a thin blue sheet, one hand tucked beneath her cheek, the other gripping Claire’s fingers.
The technician, a young woman named Brielle, explained everything in a bright voice that slowly lost its brightness.
At first, the screen looked like weather.
Gray clouds.
White shadows.
Moving shapes Claire could not understand.
Brielle moved the probe lower, then paused.
She adjusted a dial.
The room filled with a soft electronic clicking.
“Is it bad?” Sophie whispered.
“The doctor reads the images,” Brielle said.
It was the kind of answer that was not an answer at all.
She took one image.
Then another.
Then several more.
Her mouth tightened slightly at one corner.
Claire watched that corner of her mouth like it was a door cracking open.
Brielle saved the images and cleaned the gel from Sophie’s skin with a towel.
“Dr.
Mercer will be in soon.”
Soon was seven minutes.
Claire counted every one.
When Dr.
Mercer entered, he was carrying printed images in one hand and a tablet in the other.
A nurse came with him.
That was the first sign.
The
