My mother and Nicole walked in.
They looked like they had been cast in a melodramatic soap opera. Their faces were puffy and red, their eyes carefully dabbed with tissues. They wore expressions of profound, performative sorrow, perfectly orchestrated for the benefit of any doctors or nurses who might be watching.
“Oh, Emily! Thank God!” my mother wept loudly, rushing forward toward the bed, completely ignoring Aaron. “We have been out of our minds with worry!”
Aaron stood up immediately, his large frame blocking her path to my bedside. He offered her his chair, a polite but firm gesture, keeping himself between me and them.
“We were so terrified when you fainted and hit the table!” my mother continued, dabbing her eyes, seamlessly launching into the fabricated narrative she had undoubtedly rehearsed with Nicole in the waiting room. “You just collapsed! The doctors said it was a complication with the pregnancy! It was so sudden!”
Nicole hovered near the door, nodding emphatically, clutching her expensive designer purse. “It was awful, Aaron. We called 911 the second she went down. It was so scary.”
I looked at the two women standing in my hospital room. The women who had laughed and recorded me while my daughter bled inside me. The women who were currently looking my husband in the eye and lying to his face to cover up a violent assault.
