Two Can Play (Celeste and Dominic) novel Chapter 347

Chapter 347

So I ruled out the hospital. That left the medication, misoprostol, the kind of thing a woman could manage in the privacy of her own home if she had a prescription and a strong stomach. I knew the name from my work. I knew exactly what it did and how it did it, which was more than most women got, and the knowledge was not as comforting as I had hoped it would be.

I remembered a friend from university, a quiet man who had gone on to become a gynaecologist, and I spent the better part of an afternoon tracking him down. The internet gave me the clinic where he now worked, and the clinic gave me his office, and his office gave me a man who looked at me across his desk like I had just asked him to rob a bank.

“I don’t write those prescriptions, Patricia.” His voice was low, and he would not quite meet my eyes. “I’ve never written one. It’s not that simple.”

“It is exactly that simple.” I leaned forward, my hands folded on my knees, and made myself smile through the shame. “You write the word, I take the paper, and this whole thing stops being a problem for either of us.”

“Misoprostol isn’t aspirin. You don’t just hand it to a woman and wave goodbye. There are risks. There are things that can go wrong.”

“Things have already gone wrong.” I held his gaze. “That’s why I’m here.”

He argued for a long while, circling the same objections until they had no corners left, and I answered every one of them with the patient calm of a woman who had already made her choice long before she walked through his door. In the end, he sighed and reached for his pad, and I watched his pen move across the page with a strange mix of relief and dread.

I took the prescription to a pharmacy far from Helix, far from anyone who might know my face, and I bought the medicine with my head down. Then I went home.

I knew how much Celeste valued children. I knew the way she still carried the sister she had lost, the way that loss had shaped her into someone who saw every child as a thing to be protected. If I told her now, she would talk me out of it. She would hold my hands and promise to help and somehow make me believe there was a way through this that did not end with me alone and terrified. So I decided I would tell her only after it was done, when there was nothing left to talk me out of.

I stared at the tablets in my palm for a long time. They were small and white and unremarkable, and my stomach twisted just looking at them. I had not eaten since morning, but hunger felt like something that belonged to another woman, someone with a future I no longer recognized. I swallowed hard, tipped the pills into my mouth, and chased them down with water that tasted like nothing.

It was supposed to be simple. That was what the internet said, what the forums promised, what some women described with an offhand ease that now felt like a cruel joke. But my own things were always different. They had been different my whole life, and apparently my body had no intention of letting me forget it.

The nausea came first. It rose up out of nowhere, sudden and violent, and I barely made it to the bathroom before my stomach turned itself inside out. I vomited until my throat burned and my eyes watered and I thought my intestines might follow everything else into the bowl. Just when I caught my breath and believed it was over, the diarrhea hit, and I spent the next hour shuffling between the bed and the toilet like a woman twice my age.

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