REINA

The IV drip made a soft, rhythmic sound.

I had been listening to it for what felt like hours. Lying on my back staring at the ceiling of a private hospital room with a needle in my arm and a hollow place inside my chest that the doctors had given a clinical name to but that felt, in the quiet of this room, like something much simpler and much harder than any medical term could hold.

A miscarriage.

I turned the word over in my mind the way you turn something fragile over in your hands, testing its edges, trying to understand its weight. The doctor had been kind...