My Stepmother…

My throat closed.

I stared at the heart monitor of the baby on the ultrasound screen instead.

Fast. Tiny. Alive.

“I was in the woods behind the old paper mill,” I said finally. “I used to walk there after school because it was quiet.”

Dana waited.

“I thought I heard somebody call for help.”

My hands started shaking.

Dr. Patel stepped in. “That’s enough for now.”

Dana nodded immediately.

“No one’s going to force the whole story out of you in one sitting,” she said. “Not today.”

I believed her enough to keep breathing.

The ultrasound tech printed a grainy picture and handed it to me. I stared at it as if it belonged to somebody else.

There was a baby inside me.

A real baby. A person. Not just a punishment. Not just the word mistake the way Darlene spat it.

A person with a heartbeat.

“I don’t know if I can do this,” I said before I meant to.

Dr. Patel met my eyes. “You don’t have to do it alone.”

I had no idea how much that sentence would change me.

By noon, Darlene had already called the hospital three times.

Dana didn’t let her through.

Apparently my stepmother’s version of events was that I was a troubled girl who had “run off with men,” come home pregnant, become violent, and disappeared again in the night. She claimed Wesley Ashford had “kidnapped” me after finding me wandering near the road.

That might have sounded almost believable if not for the malnutrition report, the bruises at different stages of healing, the locked room described by neighbors once deputies started knocking on doors, and the fact that Darlene herself had been caught on a gas station security camera thirty minutes earlier, dragging me toward the roadside while I could barely stand.

There was no camera directly in front of the house.

But there was enough.

Wesley’s legal team arrived before sunset.

Legal team.

Plural.

Three people in immaculate suits, led by a woman named Vanessa Cole, who looked like she could reduce a jury to ash with one raised eyebrow. She spoke softly to Dana, then to the sheriff, then to Dr. Patel. Nobody argued with her.

When she came to my room, she knocked first.

“Miss Carter?”

That was my last name. My father’s name.