He grinned.
It wasn’t the mischievous, innocent smile of a child playing a game. It was a sharp, calculating, feral expression that belonged on the face of someone much, much older. It was a look that communicated a profound, terrifying lack of empathy.
He knew exactly what he was doing.
“Dylan, put the ball down,” I repeated, my voice rising slightly in pitch, genuine fear starting to spike my heart rate. I looked toward the armchair. “Nicole, tell him to put it away.”
Nicole didn’t even look up from her screen. She just let out a highly annoyed sigh. “Oh, relax, Emily. He’s just playing. You’re always so incredibly dramatic about everything. He’s not going to hurt you.”
On the adjacent loveseat, my mother didn’t even mute the game show playing loudly on the television. She kept her eyes glued to the screen, prioritizing the spinning wheel over the escalating tension in her own living room.
“Leave the boy alone, Emily,” my mother murmured distractedly, taking a sip of her iced tea. “You’re stressing him out with your nagging.”
I looked back at Dylan. The grin had widened.
He didn’t put the ball down. Instead, he planted his feet shoulder-width apart. He pulled his right arm back, his entire ten-year-old body twisting with practiced, deliberate momentum.
My breath caught in my throat. My brain screamed at me to move, to dive out of the way, but my heavy, pregnant body was too slow, too cumbersome to react in time.
Before I could even raise my arms fully to shield myself, Dylan hurled the heavy, dense rubber dodgeball with every ounce of strength he possessed.
He didn’t aim for my legs. He didn’t aim for the sofa cushions.
He aimed directly, purposefully, at the absolute dead center of my stomach.
2. The Camera and the Contraction
SMACK.
The sound of the heavy rubber impacting my abdomen was sickeningly loud in the quiet living room.
The sheer, concussive force of the blow stole all the oxygen from my lungs in an instant. It felt as though I had been kicked by a mule. The momentum knocked my upper body violently backward, my shoulders slamming hard into the wooden trim of the floral sofa.
For one microscopic, frozen second, my brain simply couldn’t process the shock of the assault.
Then, Dylan threw his hands up in the air in a gesture of triumphant victory.
“Come out, baby!” he screamed at the top of his lungs.
And he laughed. A high, cruel, genuinely amused sound that echoed off the walls.
The shock shattered, replaced instantaneously by pain.w
It wasn’t a sharp cramp. It wasn’t the dull, stretching ache of Braxton Hicks contractions I had experienced over the last few weeks. It was a violent, tearing, catastrophic agony deep within my uterus. It felt as though something vital had been physically ripped violently off the wall of my body.
A hot, blinding scream tore itself from my throat.
