The bleeding begins just after 3:00 a.m.

Lily wakes, opens her eyes, disoriented as to whether it is morning or still night. She blinks toward the clock and as she registers the time—3:06 a.m.—she becomes aware of what has woken her.

Pain grinds across her abdomen, grabbing at her, squeezing her. She is being dragged down into an abyss she does not wish to enter.

She knows this pain. It is hatefully familiar.

She swings her legs over the edge of the bed and lifts herself from the mattress, careful not to wake Daniel asleep next to her. If she is about to enter this circle of hell again, she would rather go there alone.

Her body doubles over as another wave of pain clenches her stomach. She stumbles out of the bedroom, past their en suite, along the landing, and into the guest bathroom at the end of the hall. She switches on the light, closes the door, lies on the floor, legs hugged to her chest, willing the pain to go away.

When the first trickle of blood comes, she feels it before she sees it. A violent tensing of the muscles above her pubic bone and then, abruptly, a release.

The insides of her thighs are warm and wet and she knows before she opens her eyes that she will be greeted by a dark red message spreading across the cream cotton of her pajamas.

Her eyes sting but before the first tear can surface there is another surge of pain. Her uterus contracts and she holds her breath until it passes. She knows there will be more blood, can feel it oozing out of her. But she cannot look. She will not allow herself to look.

She scrunches her eyes shut, awaits the next cycle of pain, tries to breathe through it, just as she knows she should, but it is too early to be breathing like this, four and a half months too early. She is only halfway through the pregnancy and her head does not want to comply with what her body is urging her to do.

More rounds of pain-and-release. Lily has no idea how much time has passed, how long she has been on the bathroom floor, bleeding. She knows that her head feels light and is swamped by a powerful desire to sleep. But she also knows that sleep is the one thing to which she must not, under any circumstances, succumb.

She forces open her eyes and when she raises her head to look down at her legs, her only instinct is to scream. She calls Daniel’s name, over and over, until there he is, standing in the doorway. She sees immediately, from his expression, that it is worse even than she has registered.

“Shit, Lil. Shit. Just stay there, OK? I’ll call an ambulance. You’re going to be fine. Just stay there.”

She knows he is not telling her the truth. But she also knows, as her mind floats away to some distant place, as her eyelids grow so heavy she can no longer keep them open, that she does not have the strength to think about it right now.