Chapter 2 - The Triage of Truth
The ceiling of Indiana University Health Methodist Hospital smelled of iodine, ozone, and the coppery tang of whole blood.
They did not let me into the sterile envelope of Trauma Bay 1. A nurse with iron-gray hair and an ID badge reading *M. GALLOWAY, RN* blocked me with both palms flat against my chest.
“Colonel, I don't care if you're the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs,” Galloway said, her eyes dead-level with mine. “Right now you are an obstacle to the obstetric surgical team. Sit in that chair, drink this water, or I will have security escort you to the chapel. Choose.”
I chose the chair.
I sat on the vinyl-upholstered bench directly beneath the bay doors. My dress uniform was ruined. There was dried mud on the knees from when I had knelt on the damp carpet of Abby’s bedroom, and on my right cuff, a faint smudge of Abby’s blood where her cracked lips had brushed against my sleeve.
Earl Dobbs stood against the wall opposite me. He had not sat down since we left Fort Knox at 1100 hours. His arms were folded, his thumbs hooked under his armpits.
“You need to make the notifications, ma’am,” Earl said quietly. “The garrison commander is going to want to know why a Brigade Commander is eighty miles off-post in an emergency department without a leave chit.”
“Let him write the reprimand, Earl,” I said. My fingers were locked together in my lap. “Let him strip the eagles off my shoulders. I don’t give a damn.”
“He won’t strip your eagles, ma’am. But we need JAG. If that boy’s family has local connections like the old woman was squawking about, we need a judge advocate on-site before the sun sets.”
“Call Major Douglas,” I said, remembering my staff judge advocate at Knox. “Tell him I want an immediate liaison with the Marion County Prosecutor’s Office. Tell him this is an emergency protective order situation involving an active-duty dependent under special circumstances.”
Earl nodded once, pulled his phone, and walked toward the end of the corridor, his boots striking the floor with rhythmic, deliberate thuds.
Thirty minutes later, the double doors swung wide.
A woman walked out in surgical scrubs, her mask hanging by one ear, her paper cap stained with sweat. Her badge read *DR. LINDA CHEN, OBSTETRIC SURGERY*.
“Quinn Braddock?” she asked.
I rose so fast my chair skidded back into the drywall. “How is she? How is the baby?”
Dr. Chen pulled down her mask. She had the tired, weathered face of someone who lived on the front lines of human fragility. “Abigail is stabilized for the moment. The baby has a heartbeat—one hundred and twenty beats per minute. That’s low for twenty-four weeks, but it’s rising. We’ve administered betamethasone to accelerate fetal lung development in case we have to perform an emergent cesarean section.”
“What did they do to her, Doctor?” I asked, my voice falling to a rasp. “Tell me the truth.”
Chen pulled out a tablet, tapping the glass with a stylus. “She is severely malnourished. Her BMI is down to seventeen. In the second trimester of pregnancy, that is borderline catastrophic. We found traces of phenobarbital in her blood screening.”
The floor seemed to tilt beneath my boots. “Phenobarbital? A sedative?”
“An old-school one,” Chen said, her jaw tightening. “It’s often used to treat seizures, but in high, unmonitored doses, it causes severe lethargy, confusion, and blunts motor response. It’s why she was ‘sleeping,’ Colonel. Someone was crushing it into her food. Probably that cold soup you found on the counter. It kept her compliant. It kept her from screaming when the neighbors walked past the landing.”
The rage that hit me was not the hot, blinding kind. It was the absolute, sub-zero cold of deep space. It was the clarity that comes over a soldier right before they cross the line of departure into an ambush.
“The handprint?” I whispered.
Chen closed her eyes for a second. “Two fractured ribs. Left eighth and ninth. The displacement is minor, thank God, but the bone fragments came within millimeters of lacerating her spleen. The bruising on the uterine wall is severe. The impact wasn't a grab, Colonel. It was a direct, closed-fist blow, or a boot. The tissue is contused. We’re watching for placental abruption. If the placenta tears away from the wall of the uterus, we have four minutes to save them both.”
I leaned my head back against the wall. Rob’s face came into my mind—my husband, who had died in a roll-over accident at the National Training Center nine years ago. He had held Abby when she was five minutes old, wrapped in a coarse flannel hospital blanket, his huge, rough sergeant’s hands trembling like leaves. *“She’s the whole world, Quinn,”* he had told me. *“Everything we do in the field, it’s so she gets to live in the quiet.”*
I had failed him. I had listened to sixty-one phone calls and forty-four excuses because I was too busy reviewing brigade readiness charts and managing the logistics of four thousand soldiers who weren't my blood.
“Can I see her?” I asked.
“She’s in room 412,” Dr. Chen said. “She’s conscious, but she’s coming off the sedative. Be gentle. She’s terrified that someone is coming to take her back.”
Room 412 was quiet except for the rhythmic *beep-beep-beep* of the fetal monitor.
Abby looked smaller than she had at twelve years old. They had washed the grime from her face, but the absence of dirt only made the purple circles under her eyes look darker, like pools of ink spilled on cotton. An IV line ran into the back of her left hand, and a wide elastic band held the Doppler probe against her abdomen.
*Thump-thump-thump-thump.*
The sound of my grandchild’s heart filled the small room, wet and rapid, like a small bird trapped in an attic.
I walked to the side of the bed and sat in the plastic chair. I reached out, my fingers hovering for a second, afraid that touching her would cause more pain.
“Mom?” she whispered. Her eyes fluttered open. The pupils were sluggish, but the terror was gone, replaced by an exhaustion so deep it looked like death.
“I’m here, baby,” I said. I took her fingers into mine. They were warm now from the IV fluids. “I’m right here.”
“Travis said... he said you forgot about me.” A tear tracked through the dried saline on her cheek, disappearing into her hairline. “He said you had the brigade now. He said after Dad died, I was just a chore you had to check off on your calendar. Every morning at 6:15. Like reveille.”
The words felt like a bayonet twisted between my ribs. “He lied to you, Abby. He lied to you so you wouldn't reach out for me.”
“Glenda took my phone,” she whispered, her chest hitching, the monitor jumping slightly at the increase in her heart rate. “In August. She said pregnant girls shouldn't have electromagnetic fields near their wombs. She took my purse. My car keys. She put a padlock on the outside of the bedroom door. She told the neighbors I had early-onset schizophrenia. She told the landlord I was screaming at ghosts.”
“Why didn’t you yell out the window?”
“He said if I made a sound, he’d kick the baby out of me,” she sobbed, the tears flowing freely now, pooling in the hollows of her collarbones. “He kicked me, Mom. Last Tuesday. Because I dropped a glass of milk. Glenda stood by the refrigerator and told him not to hit my face because you might demand a FaceTime call. She told him... she told him the ribs heal faster.”
I leaned down and pressed my forehead against hers. I breathed in her scent—the familiar, childhood smell of Abby, underneath the soap and the medicine.
“It’s over,” I said into her hair. “Listen to me, Abigail Braddock. You listen to your mother. Nobody is ever going to put a hand on you again. Nobody is ever going to lock a door between you and the sun. I am the Colonel, but before that, I am your mother. And I am bringing the entire United States Army down on their heads.”
A knock sounded at the door.
I turned, expecting Earl or the nurse.
Instead, a man in a rumpled gray suit stood in the opening. He had a gold badge clipped to his lapel and a file folder tucked under his arm. Behind him stood two uniform patrolmen.
“Colonel Braddock?” the man said. “I’m Detective Miller, Domestic Violence Unit. We have a problem.”
“What kind of problem?” I asked, standing up, my instincts flaring like tripwires.
May you like
“Travis Keene’s family just posted bond through a private bondsman twenty minutes ago,” Miller said, checking his watch. “And his mother just filed an emergency ex parte petition with the family court for temporary custody of the unborn child, alleging maternal drug use and neglect.”
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