COMPLICATIONS
The pain started at 3:00 AM, sharp and insistent, cutting through the shallow sleep Sophia had managed between diner shifts and drawing sessions. She lay in the motel bed, hand pressed to her lower abdomen, trying to determine whether this was the normal discomfort of advancing pregnancy or something else, something worse, something that required action she couldn't afford.
It was the something worse.
By 3:30, she was bleeding, not heavily but persistently, the kind of bleeding that her body recognized as wrong even as her mind refused to process its implications. She dressed mechanically, the movements practiced from years of emergency, the protocol of someone who had learned to function through crisis because collapse was a luxury she couldn't afford.
The free clinic wa
