“That isn’t an answer.”
“No,” I say. “It’s a warning that you may not like the answer.”
Her gaze returns to mine. She’s tired, frightened, too intelligent not to start connecting things, and still somehow brave enough to keep looking.
The knock at the door saves us both. Maksim enters without waiting to be invited, takes one look at the room, and says, “I see we’ve all had an excellent morning.”
I stand. “Check her.”
He looks from me to Sienna, then back again, and sighs the sigh of a man who has known me too long and approves of too little. “Of course,” he says. “Why make anything simple?”
He closes the door behind him and looks at Sienna the way he looks at all patients, directly and without fuss. “Tell me what happened.”
Before she can answer, I do. “Camille shoved her. Staff caught her before she hit the floor.”
Maksim gives me a brief look. “I was asking her.”
Sienna, despite everything, almost smiles. “Camille pushed me,” she says. “I lost my balance. Two of the staff caught me before I went down all the way.”
“Any pain?”
“My knees knocked the carpet a little. My hip feels sore. That’s it.”
“Dizziness?”
“Only for a second.”
“Cramping?”
She hesitates.
I feel my whole body tighten at once.
Then she says, “No.”
Maksim notices that hesitation. Of course he does. He notices everything. He moves closer and crouches in front of her. “How far along are you?”
There’s a pause.
“Eight months,” she says quietly.
The number settles in the room with a weight I don’t entirely understand until I feel it in my chest.
Eight months. I should have guessed close to that, but hearing it aloud is different. More real. More immediate. Less abstract in every possible way.
Maksim nods as if that explains several things at once. “All right. I need you to stand for a moment if you can.”
She rises carefully. He checks her pupils, her pulse, the steadiness of her breathing. Then he has her sit again and asks her to point to where she feels sore. He presses lightly at her hip, asks if that hurts, then more lightly still at her knees, her elbow, watching her face while he does it.
Finally he says, “You were lucky.”
“That seems to be a theme lately,” she says.
I look at her.
She doesn’t look back at me. She’s watching Maksim as if she can keep everything simple by refusing to glance to her left.
Maksim straightens. “From what I can tell, no serious injury. But if you feel cramping, pressure, dizziness, bleeding, or anything that feels wrong, you tell someone immediately. I don’t care if it’s in the middle of the vows.”