‘No.’ I was on my feet, starting for the door, and I was screaming, and though Peggy’s arms went around me, I couldn’t stop screaming. My screams were interspersed with Zac’s name, and the word bastard, then he was in the room too, pushing Peggy out of the way, begging me to lie down, telling me the wound would open and I was going to hurt myself and the lines were being torn out, trying to guide me back to the bed but not daring to apply force, managing to pull the red triangle and set off the lights and alarms while I pounded on his chest, telling him that I hated him, that I would hate him forever, that he killed my baby and I would kill him, and that I wanted to die. All the while, his voice was overpowering mine, telling Peggy and the nurses that I didn’t mean it, that we loved each other and it was his job to take care of me, and he was crying, too. I thought of the thing I could say that would hurt him most, the one thing I could think of that would make him hate me as much as I hated him, so he would leave me alone, so I screamed that the baby wasn’t his anyway, but he only said, ‘There is no doubt that she was mine, Holly,’ and then I screamed some more.

It was a severe placental abruption. The placenta was the organ that my body made to nourish her, to give her oxygen, to keep her blood clean and protect her from infection. The placenta was what attached the two of us. The placenta was what tore us apart, ripping away from the wall of my uterus and at the same time ripping my world into shreds.

They said it wasn’t my fault, but I know it was. I hurled myself at Zac and grabbed for the keys and fell forward, straight onto my belly, smacking it against the edge of that marble table. A blow, even weeks earlier, even months, can cause it.

They had no choice, they said, but to do a hysterectomy and multiple blood transfusions. They said I would have died if they hadn’t, and I said I wished they’d let me and not dragged me back and forced the lost blood into my body. They said, as if they had performed a miracle, that they managed to save my ovaries, so I would still make eggs, and I wouldn’t need hormone treatment. But what good did that do when there was nowhere for those eggs to go, and mere indifference on my part to the fact that they existed at all?