Again. And again. Straight to voicemail. He’d turned his phone off.

An icy certainty settled over me as another contraction tore through me. The twins were coming — six weeks early — and my husband had left me in the dark to drink champagne with his mistress.

My vision collapsed into a narrowing tunnel. I managed to dial 911, gasping my mile marker to the dispatcher just as the phone slipped from my fingers.

The world tilted, my own ragged breathing faded, and the dark pulled me under.

Chapter 3 — Walter Reed

The rhythmic beep of the dual fetal monitors was the only sound in my dim room at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center.

A state trooper had found me slumped over the wheel; they’d airlifted me in. My blood pressure was catastrophic — severe preeclampsia, driven by the stress.