Chapter Four
Dr. Webb’s records told the story Dr. Reyes’s file had been built to hide.
Across six weeks of visits, Elena’s placental readings had moved steadily in the wrong direction — the kind of pattern that, in any properly managed pregnancy, would have triggered increased monitoring, a modified activity plan, and a clear protocol for early delivery if the numbers crossed a defined threshold. Dr. Webb’s notes were blunt where Dr. Reyes’s had been vague: elevated risk, patient correctly identified her own symptoms, patient’s concerns were valid and should have been escalated weeks earlier.
Julian called Reyes’s office from the bedroom, Elena watching from the bed, and got exactly the kind of answer he now expected. The receptionist informed him, politely, that Dr. Reyes’s practice was retained directly through the Sterling Family Office — through Beatrice’s office, not Julian’s, not Elena’s — and that any change in care would need to go through the family’s usual channels.
“There is no ‘usual channel,'” Julian said, quietly enough that Elena flinched at how much quieter his fury had become than his shouting ever was. “There’s my wife, and there’s my child, and there’s a doctor who spent six weeks telling her she was fine while she wasn’t.”
He hung up before the receptionist could answer.
For the first time in three days, he looked at his wife the way he should have been looking at her all along — not for evidence of betrayal, but for what was actually written on her face. Fear. Calculation. The particular exhaustion of someone who has been fighting a war entirely alone because she wasn’t sure anyone would believe there was one.
“Why didn’t you just leave,” he asked, and it wasn’t an accusation. It was the question of a man realizing, slowly, how much easier that would have been for her, and how much it must have cost her not to.
“Because leaving meant leaving with nothing proven,” Elena said. “And a woman with nothing proven, against a family with your mother’s lawyers, doesn’t get to keep her own child. I wasn’t protecting a marriage, Julian. I was building a case. I just never thought I’d have to build it against your family instead of with them.”
