A nurse entered the waiting room.
"Quinn?" she said, over the sound of an MSNBC report about an earthquake in India. "Follow me, please."
Quinn stood and found that her legs were shaky, like they would have been if she were in Mumbai right now.
"Good luck, Nicole," her mother said to the random woman sitting across from them who'd been talking excitedly about the experimental fertility treatment she'd come for from far away.
See how hard it was to get pregnant? It couldn't just ... happen.
"Thank you so much," the Nicole woman said with a beaming smile. "God bless."
Quinn and her mother followed the nurse down the hall, under the buzz of fluorescent lights. The nurse's long, frizzy braid bounced against her puke-peach scrubs.
Katherine squeezed Quinn's hand and whispered, "Everything will be okay, sweetie. I promise."
If Quinn had ever believed that, she certainly didn't now.
"There it is. Hear that?"
A muffled, rhythmic sound. A distant drumming. Fast and strong.
A heartbeat.
A heartbeat that wasn't Quinn's own.
