Isabella
Isabella Ramirez opened the door of her townhouse to let in her ex-husband, Wyatt Hanson, who’d arrived to take their four-year-old daughter Nina for the afternoon. His expression was the usual combination of inquiry and hope, quickly fading into resignation.
“You don’t want to come for ice cream?” he asked. “Then we’re going to the Capital of Texas Zoo?”
“No.” She shook her head. “Nina’s in her room, waiting.”
His face crumpled. But he headed towards Nina’s room.
Isabella should never have married Wyatt, but he’d made her feel special—which mattered because she’d never felt like she’d fit in anywhere as the only child of a Mexican father and an Anglo mother. With both her parents working in the sciences, her father as a biologist, her mother as a physicist, her family pushed her to achieve. But she had not been interested in science, disappointing both of them by studying art and then getting an MFA.
Maybe she’d liked Wyatt because he, unlike her parents, had appreciated her artistic ability and her educational achievements. Maybe because he had made her feel beautiful, which she wasn’t. Her slender frame and curly brown hair weren’t unattractive, but neither her face nor her body was what anyone objective would find stunning.
Still, she was proud of who she’d become.
She’d taught art at a high school for three years. Now at thirty-one, she ran a successful business, selling artist’s supplies and teaching painting, catering to the well-off of Austin and their children while caring for her daughter. And herself.
Caring for herself meant not going for an ice cream. Especially not with Wyatt.
Wyatt was not a bad man. He worked construction and made a decent living. Unlike some men his age, he hadn’t let himself go. He still looked good, and she still had feelings for him. Those feelings had resulted in a mistake weeks earlier, a mistake that she now had to deal with and she couldn’t tell him about.
Not with his current religious obsessions.
Their marriage had broken up over his obsessions. After Nina was born and Isabella nearly died, Wyatt had attributed her survival to divine intervention. A pastor had joined with him in praying at the hospital. Isabella attributed her survival to an excellent surgeon at Austin General.
Soon afterwards, Wyatt joined the pastor’s church, which she refused to do. Every Sunday became a battle. He wanted her to come with him to the church, and she had no interest.
With his newfound religious convictions came his obsession with having more children and her refusal to get pregnant again.
It wasn’t that she didn’t love her daughter. Or children. But the pregnancy had almost killed her. She’d developed something that the doctor had labeled a spontaneous coronary artery dissection, which occurs when a blood vessel in the heart tears. Fast action by the hospital had saved her life, but her doctor told her that having another child would be very dangerous.
Unfortunately, Wyatt hadn’t believed it.
He’d urged her to get a second opinion. When the second doctor confirmed what the first had said, he didn’t believe that either. He’d found a natural healer who claimed that herbs, meditation, and prayer would be enough to get Isabella through a pregnancy safely.
He brought over his pastor to pray with her.
Isabella trusted the doctors. She asked the pastor to leave her house.
They’d fought about it for a year. Then he dropped the subject for six months, only to bring it up again when he’d connected with a friend from his high school days. “Babies are a blessing,” he’d say over and over. “God will not let you die.”
She considered tying her tubes, but it was expensive, and she feared surgery and anesthesia. She decided to stick with her birth control patch, which her doctor assured her was equally effective.
Wyatt tried to talk her into removing it. The situation would then deteriorate into yet another fight, and she’d refuse to have sex with him.
Eventually, all they did was fight. Then he moved out.
She could finally breathe again.
He’d regretted leaving within a month, asking her to take him back. She’d said no. The fights stopped. They divorced and worked out his visits with their daughter. For next two years, they were on amicable terms. She remembered why she’d fallen in love with him.
She shouldn’t have let him take her out for her birthday.
She shouldn’t have shared a bottle of wine with him. Or let him back into the house—and into her bed.
She’d still had the patch, but it was old. Since she hadn’t been sexually active, she’d neglected to get a new one. And Wyatt claimed he’d use a condom. At the last minute, it “fell” off. Which was why she now had a problem.
Wyatt reappeared with Nina. She had Isabella’s dark curly hair and Wyatt’s round face, and Isabella thought her the most beautiful child in the world.
“Come with us, Mommy.”
“Not today, sweetie.”
“Mommy’s tired.” Wyatt unexpectedly supported Isabella, but she didn’t like the look he gave her. “We’ll bring something back for her, okay?”
Did he know? Isabella wasn’t sure, but it didn’t matter. It wasn’t his decision. It wasn’t his life. She knew what she was going to do. She had to stay alive—for Nina. For herself.
She had had irregular periods all her life. By the time she realized she might be pregnant, she was already ten weeks. She’d thought, given the risks of pregnancy for someone who had her heart condition, that she’d qualify for an abortion, even under Texas’s ridiculously strict laws. But her doctor told her no. A woman had to be at the point of death to have a legal abortion in Texas, and a doctor who performed an abortion on a woman who merely had a high risk of dying because of heart disease could go to prison for a very long time.
Her doctor had been sympathetic. The medicines for a chemical abortion were illegal in Texas—and in any event, she was almost eleven weeks at the time of the appointment. Too late to be certain that an abortion with medication would work. He’d given her a number and warned her to tell no one.
She’d called the number, but the woman who would have helped her make the arrangements to go to Illinois, or even just New Mexico, had been killed by a hit-and-run driver. She’d learned the news hours before Wyatt arrived, when she called to check on the plans. Now she wasn’t sure what to do. She didn’t have the money to travel to another state and pay for an abortion. She had a shop to run. Her daughter to take care of.
Call Ethan. He was an artist who purchased his materials from her shop, but more importantly, he was a longstanding friend. Since high school. Ethan knew everyone and everything in the Austin world. Maybe he could help.
She watched Wyatt’s car disappear from sight before picking up her phone.