Her face twisted with the sour humiliation of being shut down. She sat in silence for a moment, then snatched up her purse.
As she passed me, her voice dropped to something frigid.
"You won't hold that seat as Mrs. Delgado for long."
That night, I was taken by strangers. They placed bets with cash, wagering on how many swings of a bat it would take to kill a three-month-old baby still inside its mother.
I called Bertram ninety-nine times. Not once did he answer. On the hundredth call, it finally connected, and I told him our baby was gone.
Silence on his end. Then: "I'm sorry, Prue. I swear I'll find whoever did this and make them pay. Just hold on."
He told me not to hang up. He was on his way.
But the very next second, a woman's tearful whimper came through the phone. It was Bertram's foster sister, Alexis Pruitt.
"Bertram, my ankle hurts so bad... ah..."
"Alexis!"
That single cry of alarm did something I'd never witnessed in ten years of marriage. It shattered the composure of a man who never lost his cool, and it stopped my heart dead.
In a decade together, I had never once heard Bertram Delgado sound panicked.
Through the phone, I listened to him bark hoarse orders at over a dozen private physicians to treat Alexis. Every frantic shout, every note of tender anxiety that crept into his voice when he spoke to her, poured into my ears, and the agony in my chest pulled at my abdomen until it felt like I was being ripped apart.
It hit me then. He wasn't a man who stayed calm under pressure. He simply hadn't met the person worth losing his calm for.
By the time night had fully fallen and blood pooled around my lower body, Bertram finally arrived with his people in tow.
"Sorry, Prue. Traffic was bad."
He scooped me up into his arms. That familiar face was as cold and unreadable as ever.
Looking at him, I couldn't reconcile this man with the one who'd been choking on panic just hours before.
My throat sealed shut. I couldn't make a single sound. My heart felt like it was being flayed alive, one slow strip at a time.
"My brave Prue."
The words hit me, and something inside me almost laughed.
Brave. Of course I was brave. I'd swallowed the agony of losing my child while listening to my own husband ignore his kidnapped wife, too busy losing his mind over another woman to spare me a single thought.