Eight Chances, All Spent

Summary

Vanessa Langley lay on my operating table, pregnant for the eighth time by the man she'd grown up with.

This time, I didn't break down the way I had the previous seven.

Instead I calmly closed the incision and went over the aftercare with her.

Seven times I'd performed the procedure on my own wife because she was carrying another man's child.

I had long since become the joke of the hospital, the story everyone traded over coffee.

From getting pregnant by him to pressuring me into ending it, she always had a reason she considered perfectly respectable.