PART 2

The water was colder than I expected when I hit it again.

Not the first fall—the second impact.

Because I didn’t sink peacefully.

I was pulled.

Hands grabbed at my soaked dress as I surfaced, dragging me toward the edge of the pool. Someone shouted my name, but it sounded distant, warped, like it was coming through glass.

My lungs burned.

My stomach cramped so violently I couldn’t tell where the pain ended and the fear began.

“Savannah!” someone screamed.

Not concern.

Not panic.

Command.

I felt fingers press against my shoulders, forcing me up onto the concrete. I collapsed there, shaking uncontrollably, water pouring off me in streams that mixed with something warmer.

Something I already knew I didn’t want to acknowledge.

My mother’s voice cut through everything.

“Oh my God, she’s overreacting again.”

A pause.

Then Brianna laughed.

“I barely touched her,” she said lightly. “She always acts like this.”

But I wasn’t listening to them anymore.

Because my body had shifted into something primal.

Something honest.

The baby wasn’t moving right.

I pressed both hands to my stomach, trying to breathe through a contraction that didn’t feel like any I had ever had before.

No rhythm.

No wave.

Just rupture.

“No,” I whispered. “No, no, no—”

Someone finally noticed my face.

My father frowned. “Get up. You’re embarrassing yourself in front of guests.”

Guests.

That word snapped something clean inside me.

I tried to stand.

My legs gave out immediately.

A sharp, tearing pain shot through my abdomen so intense it stole my vision.

And then I felt it.

Warmth.

Wrong warmth.

My breath hitched.

My entire body froze.

Because I understood, in one horrifying instant, that something inside me had changed permanently in a way I could not undo.

“Call 911,” someone finally said.

Not my mother.

Not my sister.

A guest.

Too late.

My mother scoffed again. “Stop being dramatic. She wants attention. She’s always like—”

“Stop,” a man’s voice snapped suddenly.

One of the guests had stepped forward.

A doctor.

I didn’t see his face clearly through the blur of water and tears, but I remember his tone immediately changing everything in the room.

“She’s in active obstetric trauma,” he said sharply. “You need to move away from her right now.”

Silence hit like a physical force.

For the first time, my mother didn’t speak.

Brianna stopped laughing.

Even the air felt different.

The doctor knelt beside me, checking my pulse, his voice steady but urgent. “Ma’am, I need you to stay with me. How many weeks?”

“Thirty-two…” I gasped.

His jaw tightened.

“Ambulance is on the way,” he said into his phone. “Possible placental abruption. Trauma induced.”

Those words didn’t mean much at first.

Then they meant everything.

Because I suddenly understood why I felt like I was bleeding into my own fear.

The sirens were still distant.

Too distant.

The doctor looked up at the crowd.

“Who pushed her?”

No one answered immediately.

Then Brianna spoke softly.

“I didn’t push her,” she said again.

But her voice wasn’t as confident anymore.

And my mother—my mother—finally looked down at me like she was seeing consequences for the first time in her life.

For a second, just a second, something almost human flickered in her expression.

Then it hardened again.

“Get her up,” she said. “She’s ruining the party.”

The doctor stared at her.

And I remember thinking, even through the pain:

They still don’t understand what they’ve done.

Because the truth wasn’t just that I was injured.

It was that my body had already started making a decision without them.

A decision no apology could reverse.

The sirens got louder.

Closer.

And as the world began to tilt again, I realized something terrifyingly clear:

Whatever happened next wasn’t going to stay inside that backyard.

It was going to follow all of us.