The contractions came faster now, one folding into the next with no mercy between them. I pressed my back to the cold tile and focused on my breathing, the way I had read a body was supposed to, dragging air in through my teeth, pushing it out slow. I had to keep calm. I had to deliver this baby on my own, here, on this floor that stank of bleach and cheap perfume and the spilled liquor of a Family already deep in its New Year's revelry beyond the door.
Calm down, Catherine Falcone. You can do this.
Your baby needs you.
Tears mixed with the sweat sliding down my temples as I screamed, the sound scraping my throat raw until I had almost no voice left to give. Somewhere past the locked door the club was alive, glasses clinking, a soldier laughing too loud at something Lorenzo had said, the muffled swell of music meant to drown out everything inconvenient. No one was coming. The whole operation was built to look away from what it did not want to see, and tonight that thing was me.
The lower part of my abdomen felt as though it was being torn apart from the inside, slowly, by hands that did not care whether I survived it. The air had gone thick and metallic, heavy with the smell of blood. My blood. Pooling warm beneath me on the obsidian-black tile, spreading where I could not stop it.
I had no idea how much time had passed. Minutes, an hour. The pain measured time differently than clocks did, and it only worsened with every second, climbing past anything I had a name for.
It hurt so much. And still the baby would not come out.
Panic set in, cold and electric, my heart hammering against my ribs so hard I could feel it in my teeth. I gritted my jaw and felt the blood spreading further beneath me, soaking through what was left of my dignity. My daughter was inside me and I could not get her out, and the men who should have torn this door from its hinges were toasting the new year on the other side of it.
With trembling fingers I reached up and scrawled on the frosted glass of the door, smearing the words across the cold pane in the only ink I had left.
[SOS]
I slapped my hand flat against the glass and dragged it down, leaving bloody handprints, again and again, desperate for anyone outside to look, to truly look, to understand what was happening three feet from where they stood.
The man who had just stepped out of the next stall froze. I heard it in the sudden silence of his breath, the way a soldier goes still when he realizes the situation has changed. Then he shouted, his voice cracking with something close to fear.
"Lorenzo, something feels so wrong!"
"There's blood on the door. Your wife. She might really be giving birth in there!"
When I heard someone finally name the danger out loud, a thin glimmer of hope sparked behind my ribs, small and stubborn as a struck match.
My baby. Please. Hold on for me.
But Lorenzo only sneered, the words slurred and lazy with wine and contempt. I could picture him without seeing him, leaning against the bar, one hand sliding back over his slicked hair, smoothing it down the way he always did when he was about to say something he needed everyone to believe.
"What's with the blood? She snuck a bottle of red in with her, that's all. How does a seven-month baby come now, huh? She's acting. She's always acting."
The man outside hesitated. I heard the shift of his weight, the fear still working under his voice as he tried once more, lower this time, the way a man speaks when he is questioning his boss and knows the cost of it.
"Lorenzo. Just open the door and look. You don't have to expect the worst. But you ought to be careful what comes of it."
Lorenzo stayed indifferent. And then I heard her, Gianna, cooing softly from where she draped herself against him, the gems at her throat surely caught in her fingers the way they always were when she felt the ground shift beneath her.
"She's pulled this before. Insisted Lorenzo throw me out. You don't know what she's like." A delicate, poisonous little laugh. "She's just sulking because he didn't spend the New Year with her. So now she makes a scene. That's all this is."
The man outside fell silent. No more pleading. No more questions. The match in my chest guttered, and the hope began to die with it, thinning out into the bleach-and-blood air.
Then the pain came again, white and total, and snapped me back into my own body.
No. I can't give up. Not now. Not ever.
My darling, Mommy is going to save you.
I clawed at the buttons of my coat with fingers that no longer obeyed me cleanly, and pulled it from my shoulders. With my bloodied fingertips I scrawled across the lining the only message that mattered, pressing each letter in deep so it would not be missed, a plea written in the one thing I had left to spend.
Summoning every ounce of strength I had, I forced myself up, gripping the cold rim of the toilet, dragging my ruined body onto it inch by trembling inch. Above me hung the small ventilation window, a slit of black winter night, and I reached for its latch, pushing it open into the cold. I gathered the coat and tried to throw it out, out where someone, anyone outside this club of men who looked away might find it.
But the agony would not let me straighten my back. My spine simply refused, folding me over the moment I tried, and the coat caught on the frame, snagging there, useless.
I bit down on my lip until I tasted more blood, fighting the tears that blurred everything to smears of light, and with one last raw push of will I shoved it through. It tumbled out into the dark.
Just then my foot slipped on the slick rim, and the floor came up to meet me. I fell backward, hard.
Bang! The sound cracked through the tile and out into the room beyond, and I felt it jolt them, every reveling man and woman on the other side of that door going abruptly, unnaturally still.
My vision swam, the edges going soft and gray, and through it, faint and far away as if spoken from the bottom of a well, I heard Lorenzo's voice.
"Catherine..."
