Nothing.
My mind felt both empty and overwhelmed. I pressed my ear against her chest, trying to hear something—anything. I couldn’t detect a heartbeat. I began CPR the way we’d been taught in the newborn class Ryan insisted we attend. Two fingers pressing gently. Breathe. Again. Again.
“Stop being dramatic,” Linda said from the doorway, her voice sharp. “I told you she moves too much. I secured her. That’s what you do. My mother used to do it.”
I wanted to hit her. I wanted to throw her out of the house. Instead, I grabbed my phone with trembling hands and dialed 911.
The operator’s calm voice sounded unreal against the panic filling the room. “Is she breathing?”
“No,” I gasped. “My baby isn’t breathing.”
When the paramedics arrived, Linda tried explaining herself—talking rapidly, defending her actions as if she were the victim of my supposed “overreaction.” They ignored her. They gently took Sophie from my arms, placed a tiny oxygen mask over her face, and I followed them outside barefoot, my heart hammering painfully.
Inside the ambulance, I stared at Sophie’s limp little hand and one terrifying thought kept repeating in my mind:
If I had been five minutes later, she would be gone.
At Mercy General, everything happened in sharp, bright fragments—automatic doors sliding open, nurses calling out numbers, the squeak of gurney wheels, and the sharp smell of antiseptic filling the air. I ran beside Sophie’s stretcher until someone gently but firmly stopped me.
“Ma’am, you have to wait here,” a nurse said, guiding me into a small family room that smelled faintly of coffee and fresh linens.
My hands were sticky with my daughter’s saliva and my own sweat. I couldn’t stop staring at them as if they belonged to someone else. My phone shook as I called Ryan.
He answered on the second ring. “Em? I’m in a meeting—”
“Sophie,” I choked. “She’s at Mercy General. She wasn’t breathing. Your mom—Ryan, she tied her to the bed.”
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