They believed wrong. Dr. Jonathan Pierce stepped forward, his expression unreadable as he reviewed the monitor one final time. He looked at the chart again, then at the ultrasound images that had been kept from the hospital system until that moment. When he spoke, his voice carried authority rather than shock.
“There are two infants,” he said calmly. “She was carrying twins.”
Agnes gasped, not from joy, but from fear.
Months earlier, Rebecca had learned the truth by accident, overhearing a whispered argument in the study late one night when she should have been asleep. She heard her husband’s voice, low and impatient, and his mother’s sharp reply filled with certainty. They spoke of supplements, of dosages increased slowly enough to mimic complications, of a pregnancy labeled dangerous so that intervention would be delayed at the critical moment. They spoke of inheritance laws and life insurance clauses as if they were discussing furniture.
Rebecca did not scream. She did not confront them. She listened.
That night, she cried silently into her pillow, not from fear of dying, but from the understanding that the people she trusted had already accepted her death as inevitable.