Chapter 3 - THE CALLS THEY CHOSE TO IGNORESaturday began quietly.
I spent the morning folding baby clothes while rain moved across the windows.
At four in the afternoon, my mother sent a photograph of Lily in her engagement gown. She stood beneath a crystal chandelier surrounded by white flowers.
Doesn’t she look perfect?
I replied that she looked beautiful.
At five seventeen, the first pain struck.
It was sharp enough to make me grip the edge of the kitchen counter.
I waited for it to pass.
Ten minutes later, another followed.
Then another.
I called Dr. Reyes. She told me to come to the hospital immediately.
My driver was unavailable, and the rain had made ride services unreliable. I decided to drive the short distance myself.
It was a mistake.
Halfway to the hospital, my vision blurred. A pain tore through my abdomen, and I struggled to breathe.
I pulled toward the side of the road.
Before I could stop completely, a delivery vehicle struck the rear side of my car.
The impact pushed me into a barrier.
The airbag exploded in front of me.
For several seconds, I could hear only rain and the distant sound of a horn.
Then I felt something warm beneath me.
I reached for my phone.
My first call was to my father.
No answer.
My second was to my mother.
No answer.
I called both of them again.
Then Lily.
Then my father.
Then my mother.
I left a voicemail.
“I’m on Park Avenue near the hospital. There’s been an accident. Something is wrong with the baby. Please answer.”
A stranger opened the damaged passenger door and told me an ambulance was coming.
I remember asking him to call my parents.
I remember repeating my father’s number while he wrote it on his hand.
Inside the ambulance, a paramedic examined me and said the baby’s heart rate was unstable.
“Is someone meeting you at the hospital?”
“My parents.”
The words came automatically.
At the emergency department, nurses took my phone and continued calling.
No one answered.
Dr. Reyes arrived in surgical scrubs.
“Emma, the placenta has partially separated. We need to deliver the baby now.”
I could barely understand her.
“Is she alive?”
“Yes, but we need to move quickly.”
The anesthesiologist asked whether I had an emergency medical representative.
“My father,” I whispered.
A nurse checked my records.
Victor Bennett was listed as my secondary medical proxy.
They called him again.
This time, someone answered.
The nurse stepped away to speak privately, but I heard enough.
Emergency surgery.
Premature delivery.
Risk of severe complications.
Then silence.
The nurse looked toward me.
Her expression had changed.
“What did he say?” I asked.
She hesitated.
“He said the doctors should make the necessary decisions.”
“He’s coming?”
She did not answer.
That was the moment I understood.
They knew.
They knew where I was.
They knew the baby was in danger.
And they were staying at the party.
As the nurses pushed my bed toward the operating room, my phone lit up one final time.
A message from my mother appeared on the screen.
We cannot leave right now. Please stop calling everyone and let the doctors handle it.
I stared at those words until the operating-room doors closed.
Grace was born at six forty-three in the evening.
She weighed a little over four pounds.
She did not cry immediately.
The last thing I remembered before losing consciousness was a doctor carrying my daughter toward a team of specialists.
When I woke, it was the following afternoon.
The first person beside my bed was not my father.
It was Miriam Cole, Daniel’s longtime attorney.
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She held my uninjured hand and said, “Your daughter is alive.”
Then she told me my parents still had not arrived.
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