I was hemorrhaging badly in the emergency room after losing our baby, but my husband did not care; he yanked the IV from my arm, struck me across the face, and snarled, “You could not even carry a child properly, you worthless trash,”,…

I sat in a plastic chair at a metal table, with a guard at the door and Karen waiting in the hallway. They had allowed the visit for one reason: if Marcus was going to talk, they wanted to know what he would say.

He came in wearing a gray jumpsuit, his hair shorn short, ten pounds thinner. Without the suits and the cameras, he looked like a stranger who had borrowed my husband’s face.

“You came,” he said.

“You said it was about the baby.”

He lowered himself into the chair. His hands, once so smooth, were chapped and raw. “I have eighteen more years in here, Elena. I’ll be fifty-nine when I walk out. I’ve had a lot of time to think.”

“Don’t perform for me.”

“I’m not.” His voice cracked on the last word. “I swear to God I’m not.”

I waited.

“The night you lost the baby,” he said, “I did not know why. I thought it was stress. I thought it was your body.” He swallowed. “Then my mother made a comment last month, during her visit. She said it had been a mercy. That a child would have complicated the timeline.”

My skin went cold.

“I asked what she meant. She wouldn’t say. But she used to bring you tea, Elena. That herbal blend from the woman in Pilsen. She said it would help with the morning sickness.”

“I drank it every day,” I whispered. “For four months.”

“I know.”

“Marcus.” My voice was barely a sound. “What was in it?”

“I don’t know.” Tears ran down his face, and I felt nothing, nothing at all. “But I think my mother does. And I think she did it because I told her the Salazars wanted leverage. Someone who couldn’t be a family man. Someone who could be a clean slate.”

The guard shifted at the door.

“You told your mother,” I said, “that a baby was a problem.”

“I said it once. Out loud. Drunk. After a bad meeting.” He bent forward until his forehead touched the table. “I never thought she’d listen.”

I stood.

My chair scraped the floor, loud in that bare room. I looked down at the man who had once been my entire world, and I understood that nothing he could say would ever be enough.

“Why tell me now?” I asked.

He looked up.

“Because you’re the only person I ever hurt who didn’t deserve it,” he said. “And because I’m not asking you to forgive me. I just wanted one true thing to come out of me.”

I walked out without answering.

In the hallway, Karen took one look at my face and put a hand on my shoulder.

“Elena?”

“I need to see the medical records from that night,” I said. “Every page. And I need to find a woman in Pilsen who sells tea.”

PART 5

Dana found the records in three days.

She was no longer working at the hospital. After she testified, the administration had quietly pushed her out, and she had taken a job at a community clinic on the West Side. She met me at a diner with a thick envelope and shadows under her eyes.

“I shouldn’t have these,” she said.

“Then why are you handing them to me?”

“Because I was in that room.” Dana slid the envelope across the table. “And because the toxicology panel was never fully reviewed. They flagged one value, then someone told them to drop it.”

I opened the folder.

A chart. A column of numbers. One line highlighted in faded yellow.

Unidentified plant-derived compound. Consistent with uterine stimulant. Recommend further analysis.

Further analysis had never happened.

“Who told them to drop it?” I asked.

“The hospital’s legal department.” Dana’s mouth tightened. “They got a call from a lawyer for the Bell family. The next morning, the entry was marked inconclusive.”

I shut the folder very carefully, because my hands were not steady.

The woman in Pilsen was named Marisol Quintero.

She ran a small botanica on Eighteenth Street, between a bakery and a shuttered laundromat. Candles flickered in the window. Dried herbs hung from the ceiling in bundles. Marisol herself was sixty, round-faced and soft-spoken, and when I walked in she was arranging a shelf of saints.

“Can I help you, mija?”

“My name is Elena Bell. My mother-in-law bought tea from you.”

The woman went still.

She did not run. She did not deny it. She only set down the little ceramic statue in her hands and turned the sign in the door to Cerrado.

“I wondered when someone would come,” she said.

“What was in it?”