Chapter 5 - The Digital Archive
The text messages were not limited to the early months of their relationship. As the pregnancy progressed, the tone of their communications shifted from the quiet, nervous excitement of an office affair to something far more calculated, and far more dangerous.
Dr. Osei pulled a second stack of paper from the blue folder. These were different from the MedConnect logs—these were personal text messages recovered from Cameron's work-issued cellular phone, which he had surrendered to the compliance team when his suspension was formalized.
"These were sent during your thirty-fifth week," Dr. Osei said, her voice dropping to a low, flat register. "The same week your blood pressure began to trend upward."
S_Mendoza: She’s at 140/90 this morning. I saw her chart. Are you going to induce?
C_Grant: Not yet. If I induce now, she’ll have a clean, controlled delivery. She’ll be back on her feet in three weeks, and she’ll be insufferable about how she managed to balance everything. We need to let it run. A delayed delivery will make her look less stable to the board.
S_Mendoza: What if something happens to the baby? I don’t want to be involved in a malpractice case, Cameron. My career hasn’t even started.
C_Grant: Nothing is going to happen to the baby. I’m managing the strip. But a few complications... a long, difficult labor, maybe some post-partum depression or a prolonged recovery... it would simplify things. It would make the custody filing much cleaner. The courts don't give sole custody to a mother who can't even get out of bed to feed her child.
I looked at the printed page. My fingers, still stiff from the IV fluids, traced the outlines of the characters.
A few complications.
He had sat beside me at our kitchen island, rubbing my swollen ankles, telling me that my headaches were just the result of my "type-A personality" and that I needed to stop checking my own blood pressure. He had brought me chamomile tea and kissed my forehead, while in his pocket, his phone was warm with messages discussing how to turn my delivery into a medical catastrophe that would strip me of my child.
"He wanted me to be weak," I said, my voice barely a whisper in the quiet room.
"He wanted you to be dependent," Dr. Osei corrected gently. "And he wanted to make sure that when he walked away, he took the child with him. He had already drafted the custody petition, Amelia. We found the files on his office computer. They were created in May."
I closed my eyes. The image of the delivery room returned, but the colors were different now. It wasn't a scene of medical panic; it was a scene of calculated execution.
I remembered the sound of the fetal monitor’s alarm, the rapid, high-pitched beep-beep-beep that indicated our son's heart rate was dropping into the nineties, then the eighties. I remembered the nurse, Evelyn, reaching for the oxygen mask, and Cameron’s hand on her arm, stopping her.
“She’s hyperventilating, Evelyn. The deceleration is maternal. Just give her a minute to calm down.”
He hadn't been trying to save me. He hadn't even been trying to save our son. He had been waiting for the "complications" to reach the precise level of severity that would serve his purpose, without realizing that a uterine rupture does not wait for a physician’s convenience.
"This is enough to revoke his license," I said, my voice flat, devoid of any feeling. "Not just suspend it. Revoke it."
"The medical board has already been notified," Dr. Osei said, closing the blue folder with a heavy, final snap. "They have requested copies of all the transcripts and the video footage. But Amelia... you need to understand that the legal process is slow. Cameron has hired a very aggressive defense counsel. He is going to try to paint this as a clinical judgment call that simply went wrong."
"A clinical judgment call," I whispered.
"Yes," she said. "He is going to argue that he was managing a difficult, anxious patient who happened to be his wife, and that the uterine rupture was an unpredictable, silent catastrophe. He is going to try to make you look like the unreliable witness."
May you like
I looked down at the scar on my palm, the red, raw line where the steel bedrail had cut into my skin while I was trying to pull myself away from him.
"Let him try," I said.
