The Ride to St. Agnes
Chapter 08 - The Ride to St. Agnes
The ride to St. Agnes Medical Center took twenty-three minutes, but to Grace it felt like a lifetime stretched thin over every red light. Noah drove with both hands on the wheel while Grace sat in the passenger seat, one hand pressed to her stomach and the other curled around the ultrasound photo.
Neither of them spoke for the first ten minutes.
The city moved around them in normal pieces: people carrying coffee, a school bus turning a corner, a man walking a dog that kept pulling him toward a bakery window. Grace wanted to scream at all of it. How dare the world look ordinary when her babies were fighting inside her? How dare the sun fall across the dashboard like this was just another day?
Noah finally broke the silence. “I don’t know how to apologize for this.”
“Then don’t start with words,” Grace said.
He nodded, eyes fixed ahead. “Okay.”
Grace looked at him. “You left.”
His jaw worked. “I thought if I stayed, I’d say something unforgivable.”
“You already did,” she said softly. “You asked if the baby was real.”
Noah’s eyes filled, but he did not wipe them. “I know.”
Grace turned toward the window. Part of her wanted him to suffer. Another part hated that she wanted that. She had loved Noah for so long that his pain still reached for her automatically. But love, she was beginning to understand, was not the same thing as trust. Love could survive a wound. Trust had to be rebuilt like a house after fire, beam by beam, with every weak board removed.
At a stoplight, Noah pulled the folded fake report from his jacket pocket and handed it to her.
Grace stared at it. The paper was clean, official-looking, with a copied logo at the top and Dr. Reed’s name typed beneath a signature line. It claimed there were “no viable fetal indicators” and recommended “psychological evaluation for possible false pregnancy fixation.”
Her vision blurred.
“This is what you saw?”
“Yes,” Noah said. “Mom brought it to me. She said it came through the insurance office. I was scared, confused, angry. She kept saying you needed help.”
Grace’s voice trembled. “And you never thought to ask me?”
“I did,” he said. “But when I saw your face, I thought you were hiding something.”
“I was hiding from your mother.”
The light turned green. Noah drove.
After a while, he said, “I’m going to report this.”
Grace looked at him. “Against Vivian?”
“Against whoever forged a medical record,” he said. “Even if it is my mother.”
It was the first sentence that sounded like a foundation.
Grace turned back to the window and held the photo tighter.
May you like
Inside her, one baby shifted, or maybe she imagined it.
Either way, she whispered, “Hold on, little ones. We’re almost there.”
