“Are you all right, Nicole?” Dr. Rosen asked.
Nicole nodded. She looked to Red and he came over to hold her hand during the procedure.
“Just let me know if you experience any discomfort. Take some deep relaxing breaths if you need to.”
When Dr. Rosen inserted the probe, Nicole did feel pressure, however there wasn’t any pain and she had total confidence in Dr. Rosen’s abilities. Mostly she was just frightened because she knew what they were going to find.
“Okay, I do see the fetus,” Dr. Rosen said, as she moved the probe slowly from side to side. “I’m getting a picture and now I’m just trying to locate the heartbeat.”
A long time went by.
Dr. Rosen’s face was a study of pure concentration, staring at the monitor. Ever since she’d said she was trying to find the baby’s heartbeat, she hadn’t said another word.
The seconds continued to tick by, and Nicole felt her eyes well up with tears.
“It’s okay, Nicole,” Red said, but his voice was choked up.
Dr. Rosen began to talk, but there was a loud ringing in Nicole’s ears and she couldn’t really hear what the woman was saying to her. Nicole wasn’t listening anymore.
All she knew was that her unborn child didn’t have a heartbeat.
FOR HIS TRUST (FOR HIS PLEASURE, BOOK 5)
It had been three days.
Three days since everything had changed and Nicole’s entire world had gone dark. No, not completely dark, because she still had Red. But it was a gray film over everything, and she was stuck in the gray. It was like her legs were filled with lead, every step she took was achy and sapped her energy.
She was lying in bed mostly, needing to be taken care of, and Red was doing just that. Maybe he wished that he could lie in bed all day and have someone take care of him. Surely he had as much to be sad about as she did. In the space of just a month he’d lost the business he’d spent his life building from the ground up, and then he’d lost his unborn child.
Losing your baby was painful—but not even having the chance to really know your baby or hold your baby was also painful.
The doctor couldn’t tell them whether it was a girl or boy—it was far too early in the pregnancy for that. Nicole wanted to know—she wanted to be able to grieve, and somehow it felt like knowing the gender of the baby would help that process.
Recently, she began to feel somehow that the baby had been a girl. Nicole didn’t know where the conviction arose from, but she decided to go with it just the same. Secretly, she named the girl Renee and made an internal promise not to forget her. Sure, she’d been just seven weeks old—but she’d still been alive and Nicole felt it was important to remember her no matter what.
Nicole had also been told it might take weeks for her body to expel the fetus—“expel,” as if the baby had been somehow bad and needed punishment—but she’d actually done it yesterday.
It had happened when she’d gotten another severe bout of cramps in the afternoon and gone to the bathroom. She’d seen the gray fetal sac and everything, and it had been horrible and deeply sad, and yet seeing it had brought some closure too.
So now the physical part was over. There was no more baby, there was nothing more to come—just this emptiness, this gray air that Nicole found herself walking through and talking through and seeing through.
Lying in bed was all she wanted to do right now, and Red was letting her do it. He brought her food, stroked her hair, spoke to her softly and held her hand in his own. He told her it would be okay, that she would be okay again at some point. He told her to take her time.
But today she couldn’t take her time anymore, because her mother was visiting the house. It would be her mother’s first time at the mansion and Nicole didn’t know how she would react to it all.
“You’re mother’s at the front gate,” Red said to Nicole as he came in the bedroom. “Do you want to come down or should I just bring her up?”
“No, no, I’ll get up and come downstairs.” Slowly, Nicole pushed herself into a sitting position.
She needed a shower but wasn’t going to have time right now. Even though she’d known since yesterday that her mom was coming, Nicole still hadn’t been able to get herself moving. She was like a toy robot whose batteries were running down.
Red left the room and Nicole got up, went to the bathroom and washed her face, brushed her teeth, put on deodorant.
Then she changed into some baggy cargo pants and a comfy sweatshirt. She tied her hair back in a ponytail and surveyed herself in the mirror. She looked yellowish, sickly, and you could read the depression in her eyes.
She put on some makeup—nothing fancy—just to give her face some color.