Excerpt of Marriage in Jeopardy by Anna Adams

LYDIA QUINCY OPENED her eyes. Memory rushed at her with the menace of an oncoming tornado. She remembered walking out of the elevator at the courthouse construction site. A woman had come around a stack of bricks. She'd never forget that woman's mouth, stretched in a grin of pure malice. Lydia's muscles clenched as she tried to duck again. That woman had swung a piece of rebar straight into Lydia's stomach.

The moment replayed like a loop of film.

She tried to breathe.

Staring around the unfamiliar room, she saw blank tan walls and mountains of hoses, wires, tubing. A machine that screamed with blinking numbers. A shapeless beige curtain and hard plastic rails on her bed.

One more breath brought nausea so strong she had to escape. She struggled to sit, but an IV stung her arm. Oxygen tubing pulled her head back. "Lydia?" Evelyn, her mother-in-law, spoke to her in a sleepy voice. How could she be here? She lived four hours away. "Lie down, honey." Evelyn leapt to her feet, sending a metal chair screeching across the tile floor.

Lydia slumped against a flat pillow and it crackled beneath her head. She pushed both hands down to her stomach, but bone deep, she already knew what had happened.

The physical pain was nothing, compared to her grief. She drew her knees high, clamping her hands to her belly. She felt only emptiness. Not life. Emptiness.

"My baby." She let her hands sink to her sides.

"My baby," she cried in anguish more animal than human.

Evelyn grabbed her arm. Tears washed her glasses and spilled over her lined cheeks.

"I'm sorry." She peered toward the door, as if she hoped someone would show up and save her.

"Where's Josh?" Lydia half expected he'd stayed at work.

Evelyn had been reaching for the call button at Lydia's side, but drew back. "He wanted to be the one to tell you, but I can explain —"

"I know. Don't say it out loud." The second someone did, her pregnancy would be truly over.

All that hope, so futile now... She couldn't stop loving her son just because she'd never have him.

"Lydia, honey..."

She pushed at her mother-in-law's thin shoulders. "No, no, no."

"Shh," Evelyn whispered, putting her arms around Lydia anyway. "Shh."

Lydia sobbed. "I want my baby." He'd died, but somehow she hadn't. "Why am I alive?"

Evelyn moved away, grimacing. "I know how you feel, but you can't — you have to live."

A nurse hurried into the room and nudged Evelyn away. "Mrs. Quincy, I'm glad you're awake." The woman checked the machine's readouts and threaded the IV tubes through her fingers. "Mrs. Quincy?" she repeated as if she needed Lydia to answer.

"I'm all right." Lydia nodded at the nurse, but reached for her mother-in-law. Her hand fell through air to the sheets. "Is Josh in court? How did you get here first, Evelyn, when his office is only a few blocks away?"

"Your husband?" the nurse asked. "He's here. He passed our station a few minutes ago."

"He left?" Typical, but still it hurt. Things had begun to get better during the twenty-two weeks of her pregnancy, but before then, they'd spent much of their five-year marriage pulling in opposite directions, unable to speak, unable to explain why they couldn't. Once they'd learned the baby was coming, they'd both wanted him so much they'd pretended nothing was wrong.

"Josh has been here whenever they let us in," Evelyn defended her son. "But you know how he is. Impatience and anger go hand in hand, and add worrying about you — he needed a walk."

Lydia knew Josh better than his mother did.While she could hardly hear above the pain screaming in her own head, Josh had no doubt taken refuge in calls to his office. That was Josh. If he couldn't fix his private life, he turned to maintaining his reputation as the best public defender in Hartford, Connecticut.

"I —" She wanted to be angry. God knew, she'd had practice, but she needed her husband. He'd lost their baby, too.

"What?" Evelyn asked. "What can I do for you?"

"Do?" No one could erase the instant or the memory. Sun glinting off a green truck's hood had blinded her as she'd walked around the bricks. One of those bricks had grazed her arm. She turned her elbow, trying to see the scrape, to see anything except that woman.

Her unborn son had probably died the moment the rebar hit. She covered her mouth. "Try not to think about what happened. Let me call Josh."

"Don't go." She didn't trust herself to think on her own yet.

Evelyn squeezed her hand but turned to the nurse. "My daughter-in-law's lips are cracking. Can you get her something?" Her voice rasped as if she'd been yelling.

"How long have you been here?" Lydia had assumed this was the same day, but her mother-inlaw looked tired and worn.

"I'll bring you both something to drink." The nurse gave the machines a last look as she backed toward the door. "Mrs. Quincy, you're in good shape. Your doctor will be in to see you — well, I can't say for sure when — but you don't need to worry."

Not worry? She had to be nuts. "What happened after she hit me, Evelyn?" Josh's mother splayed her fingers into short red curls that were flat on one side from her long stint in the chair. "I'll tell you what we know." Weariness veined her eyes. She stole a glance at her watch. "Unless you want me to find Josh," she said again.

This woman who never cried on the principle that tears were weakness had cried a lot. Lydia brushed a teardrop off her own cheek. "He's not here. Explain what happened to my baby. I remember being at the courthouse." An architect, she'd been hired to help restore it to eighteenth-century splendor. She'd visited that day only to discuss a change with the contractor. "I was leaving." At a new wave of sorrow, she pressed her palms to her stomach again. "How long have I been here?" How many days had she been alive instead of her son, who'd never had a chance to live?

"Three days." Evelyn wiped her face with the hem of her cotton shirt. "You've been awake now and then."

"I don't remember." But bursts of pain and light and that damn machine bleating ran through her mind. "Who was she?"

"Vivian Durance. I lost her husband's case." Josh's voice, thick with sorrow, made Lydia and Evelyn look toward the doorway. He stood, frozen.

His words didn't register. She drank him in, desperate, because he was the only one who could really understand. Tall and aloof-looking — as always, when he felt most emotional — he stared at her, guilt in his brown-black eyes. Tight dark curls stood on end as if he'd yanked at his hair to punish himself.

"I'll wait outside," Evelyn said, and she passed Josh without looking at him.

He stepped aside to avoid his mother's touch. After the door closed, he crossed to the bed, unsure of his welcome. Lydia held out her arms. With a sigh, his eyes beginning to redden, he caught her, his arms rough. She flinched.

"I'm sorry." He eased up a little, but when he buried his face in her shoulder, his breathing was jagged. "I'm sorry."

His remorse forced the truth to sink in. "Vivian Durance is married to one of your clients?"

She'd been afraid of this, a low-grade fear, like a fever she'd never managed to get over. About two weeks after their wedding, the first threat from an unsatisfied client had arrived in the form of red paint thrown across their town house's door. The client's father had also slipped a red-stained note through the letter box. "If my son goes to prison, you die," it read, and it was written with so much rage, the words almost ripped the paper.

Josh had repainted the door, chucked the note away and reassured her that all attorneys, even public defenders, occasionally received threats. Two years later another client had met him on the courthouse steps. Everyone who'd seen the man on the stand knew his own testimony had sealed a guilty verdict. Nevertheless, the man had blamed Josh, screaming until the cops had dragged him away.

Three more years had passed, but Lydia had never again felt entirely safe.

"Did you know she was coming after us? What did she say to you?" Lydia tried not to blame him, but the words begged to be said.

"Nothing." He leaned back. "She screamed at the court in general."

"What aren't you telling me?"

He shook his head, but his eyes were blank. He was hiding something.

Furiously, she bit down on the words, but she couldn't help herself. "Third time's the charm, I guess. Someone finally got to us."

"That's what I was afraid of," he said, his calm dignified — and infuriating. "That you'd blame me."

"Our baby didn't have to die."

"I am sorry." His lips barely moved. She'd loved his mouth, full, moist, capable of giving her pleasure that was almost pain. That was the physical part of their marriage. Nothing else about living together had come easy. "I'm not hiding anything," he said. "The truth was bad enough."

She stared, unable to speak. He was in shock, too, which exaggerated his guilt. It couldn't be all his fault.