Chapter 3 - DR. ORTIZ’S SECOND QUESTION
Once the ultrasound changed the direction of the room, Dr. Ortiz asked Eric and Daniel to step outside.
Eric resisted.
Daniel did not.
“I’ll be right out there,” Daniel told Sophie.
She nodded.
Eric looked at me.
“I’m her father.”
“And I need a few minutes with my patient and her mother.”
Dr. Ortiz did not raise her voice.
Eric eventually left.
The door closed.
Sophie immediately began crying.
“Mom, why did Dad say that about Daniel?”
I sat beside her.
“He got scared and made an assumption.”
“That was horrible.”
“Yes.”
“You don’t think Daniel—”
“No.”
I answered before she finished.
“I believe you.”
Her shoulders dropped slightly.
That mattered more than I knew.
Dr. Ortiz pulled a chair closer.
“Sophie, I’m going to ask some ordinary medical questions. You’re not in trouble.”
Sophie nodded.
Dr. Ortiz asked about the pain.
When it began.
Whether it woke her at night.
Whether she had lost weight.
Whether she had noticed bloating.
Sophie hesitated at that one.
“A little.”
I looked at her.
“You never told me.”
“I thought I was getting fat.”
My heart broke.
She continued.
Her jeans had felt tighter some days.
Then normal again.
She had started wearing oversized sweatshirts because several girls at school teased her.
About what?
Sophie stared at the rabbit.
“They said I looked pregnant.”
I closed my eyes.
Children could smell vulnerability before adults had a name for it.
“Did you believe them?”
“No.”
Then quieter:
“Maybe a little.”
Dr. Ortiz remained calm.
“The elevated hormone can happen for reasons unrelated to pregnancy. The scan shows a mass near one of your ovaries.”
Sophie’s face went blank.
“Mass?”
“It means there’s tissue where we don’t expect it. We need more information before we know exactly what it is.”
“Cancer?”
The word came out barely audible.
Dr. Ortiz did not lie.
“We have to investigate that possibility.”
Sophie’s fingers found mine.
I squeezed.
Then Dr. Ortiz asked something else.
“Any family history of ovarian tumors, unusual hormone-producing tumors, or cancers diagnosed young?”
I started to say no.
Then stopped.
My mother.
She had undergone surgery at sixteen.
I had always been told it was “a cyst.”
Grandma never discussed it.
She died when I was twenty-four, long before Sophie was born.
“What kind of surgery?” Dr. Ortiz asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Can you get records?”
“Maybe.”
Something changed in her expression.
Not certainty.
Interest.
The mystery had widened.
May you like
And suddenly the family secret we needed might not belong to Daniel or Eric at all.
It might belong to someone who had been dead for fourteen years.
