Someone ran over and hauled me up, dragged me to the side of the road. I heard shouting“Call an ambulance”—someone asking if anyone else was in the car. I said no.
I lay on the ground, staring up at the washed-out gray sky, and realized I couldn't feel the pain anymore.
Just the cold.
I turned my head and saw Cliff still crouched beside Phyllis. He'd taken off his jacket and draped it over her. The jacket I'd given him last month for his birthday.
I closed my eyes.
The ambulance came.
When the paramedics lifted me onto the stretcher, I heard quick footsteps approaching.
“There's another injured person here.”
Cliff's voice.
He stood beside the stretcher and glanced down at me. I opened my eyes and met his gaze. His eyes stayed on my face for one second, then moved away.
“Treat her first,” he said, pointing toward Phyllis. Not a crack in his voice. “Her injuries are worse.”
Phyllis had a scrape on her leg.
My leg was broken. Three ribs were broken. Something inside my abdomen was bleeding. The gash on my forehead was still pouring blood.
I looked at him. He wouldn't look back.
The paramedic said, “This woman is in critical condition. We need to get her in now——”
“She's my wife,” Cliff cut him off, his tone completely flat. “I said treat her first.”
The person he meant was Phyllis.
The whole scene suddenly felt absurd.
My husband was standing right in front of me, not a scratch on him. Twenty meters away, the one he never got over had a scrape on her shin—and he was demanding the paramedics treat her first. Leaving me——his wife, three broken ribs, bleeding internally, skull split open——on the asphalt.
He didn't even crouch down to ask if I was okay.
The paramedic ignored him and pushed my stretcher toward the ambulance. The moment they lifted me in, I heard Phyllis call out from somewhere behind us“Cliff”——thin, teary.
Cliff turned and walked away.
The ambulance doors closed.
I lay inside, staring at the white ceiling, and one detail surfaced.
From the moment of the crash to the moment he left, Cliff never once said my name.
Never even looked at me a second time.
The surgery took six hours.
They removed my spleen—it had ruptured. Three ribs fractured, one of them driven into my lung; they put in a chest tube to drain the cavity. My left tibia was broken, pinned together with a steel plate. Fourteen stitches across my forehead.
When I woke up, the room was quiet.
The window was dark. Only the heart monitor beeped its steady rhythm. I looked down at my stomach, wrapped in gauze, and felt a dull ache low in my abdomen.
When the nurse came in to change my dressing, I asked.
“The baby……is the baby still there?”
Her hands went still for a moment.
She looked at me with that kind of sympathy I knew too well.
“You didn't know?”
“No.”
“During surgery, they found a uterine rupture. The bleeding was severe, and we……” She took a breath. “We performed a hysterectomy. The baby didn't survive either.”
I stared at the ceiling.
“Okay.”
The nurse glanced back at me several times on her way out. She probably thought I was too calm. I wasn't calm. I just hadn't caught up yet. My brain was shielding itself, queuing everything for later so I wouldn't have to feel it all at once.
It caught up the next morning.
The nurse came to change the drainage bottle and pulled back the blanket. I saw the scar running down my belly—long, from my pubic bone all the way to my navel, closed with neat even stitches, but so long.
I reached down and touched it.
