Novels by Just a baby

*This is just a little scare that we gave you. Pay up. Next time it lands you in your grave.*I read it twice.Then I put the phone face-down in my palm, looked straight ahead at the traffic moving past the hospital entrance, and breathed.There were people everywhere. A woman pushing a stroller. A man in scrubs eating something wrapped in foil. An elderly couple moving slowly toward the automatic doors. None of them were looking at me.None of them knew that the woman standing on this pavement with a cracked phone and bruised ribs had been dead three days ago.I breathed again.Victor Dane. The name rose from Lilian's memory clean and cold, the way your body remembered danger before your mind caught up to it, a tightening across the shoulders, a low instinct that said *this one is serious*. Frank Hayes had borrowed from Dane's operation over a period of three years, the debt quietly snowballing the way debt did when you couldn't touch the principal. When Frank died, the balance trans

I woke up on the bathroom floor.For a second I didn't move. Just lay there, cheek against cold tile, staring at the gap between the base of the sink and the floor where a thin line of dust had gathered along the edge. My breathing was shallow. My head throbbed low and steady.Then it all came back.The mirror. The hands that weren't mine. The flood of someone else's memories pouring through the one I already had.I sat up slowly, pressing my back against the wall, drawing my knees to my chest. A strange calm had settled over everything, the way it sometimes does after a storm has already broken, not peace, exactly, but the particular quiet of a person who has run out of room to panic and has to start thinking instead.Lilian Hayes.I said the name out loud, soft, testing the shape of it in a mouth that wasn't mine.She'd been a waitress. A girl who smelled like coffee and fryer oil at the end of a double shift, who counted tips at a corner table before walking home because cab fare w

The first thing I noticed was the ceiling.White. Plain. A water stain shaped like nothing in particular, sitting in the upper left corner above a fluorescent light that buzzed faintly every few seconds.I stared at it for a long time.Something told me not to move too fast. My body felt wrong, every muscle carrying a weight it shouldn't, like I'd been wrung out and put back together with half the pieces missing. The kind of pain that doesn't announce itself all at once. It waits for you to shift position, then introduces itself properly.I tried to sit up.Three things happened at once: a sharp pull across my ribs, a throb at the back of my skull that made my vision white out at the edges, and a sound that came out of my own throat that I didn't recognize.My voice. That was my voice.Except it wasn't.I lay back down, breathing through my teeth, staring at the ceiling again. I told myself it was the anesthesia. They'd put me under for the surgery, and sometimes it did things to you,

Eleanor pov The ceiling tiles blurred past above me, one after another, white squares smearing into a single pale streak as the gurney rolled.I couldn't feel my legs anymore. I could feel everything else. every wrong angle of my own body, every place the fall had broken something it shouldn't have. But my legs were just gone, far away, someone else's legs.I remember thinking, absurdly, that I should be more afraid than I was. I had spent my whole life afraid of small things, afraid of failing tests, afraid of disappointing my father, afraid of an empty pregnancy test turning up negative one more time. None of those fears had prepared me for this particular kind of calm, the strange stillness that settles over a body once it has decided, somewhere below conscious thought, that it doesn't have the strength left to panic."Stay with me, Eleanor." A man's voice. Dr. Bell's, I thought, though it kept sliding in and out of focus, like a radio station slowly losing its signal. "Stay with

The hospital room smelled like antiseptic and lilies.Eleanor woke slowly, pain blooming through her body in waves, her back, her ribs, a deep ache low in her abdomen that made her gasp the moment consciousness returned.For a few disoriented seconds, she didn't remember anything at all. Then it came back in fragments the staircase, the cold rush of falling, Julian's voice somewhere above her growing smaller and smaller. She tried to move her hand to her stomach and found it heavier than it should have been, an IV taped to the back of it, a second tube disappearing somewhere beneath the blanket.*The baby.* The thought hit her before anything else. *Is the baby okay?*The lights were too bright. The room was full of faces.Her father stood near the window, gray-faced and silent, looking older than she'd ever seen him. Diane sat beside him, twisting a tissue in her hands, unable to meet Eleanor's eyes. Priya was there too, eyes red-rimmed, pacing near the door like she couldn't decide

Eleanor stood in front of the bathroom mirror that morning, running a brush through her hair, watching the curve of her stomach in the reflection. Nine pounds of baby, the books said, give or take. A whole person, built inside her body over the course of a year that had broken her down and put her back together in equal measure."You ready for this?" she whispered to her reflection. "Last week. Last week was just us."The thought made her laugh and tear up at the same time. She thought about the nursery down the hall, painted soft yellow, the crib Julian had assembled with his own hands. She thought about how far they'd come from that morning four years ago when he'd left without a goodbye kiss.She didn't let herself think, even for a second, that the distance they'd traveled might have been an illusion the whole time.One week before her due date, Eleanor's friends insisted on one last night out before the baby came."Nothing crazy," Priya promised, looping an arm through hers as th