She swallowed, looked at the monitor again, and said in a low voice:

I went to another gynecologist just to be calm, but when she turned pale looking at my ultrasound and asked in a low voice, “Who followed your previous exams?”, I replied, “My husband, doctor… he’s also a gynecologist.” Then she turned off my screen, looked at me as if she had just discovered something terrible, and said, “I need to do tests on you right now. What I’m seeing shouldn’t be there.”

It wasn’t the tone of her voice. It was the color of her face.

My new gynecologist stopped moving the transducer, turned off the screen of the ultrasound machine I was looking at, and asked me a question that chilled my blood.

“Who followed your previous exams?”

“My husband,” I replied. “He’s a gynecologist too.

“I need to test you right now. There’s something inside you that shouldn’t be there.

Up until that point, I kept telling myself that maybe I was only more sensitive because of the pregnancy. It was my first baby. I was seven months old. And apparently, I had the luck that many women dream of: a husband who is a doctor, attentive, protective, always taking care of everything.

My husband, Ricardo, controlled my vitamins, my diet, my schedules, my ultrasounds, and even the temperature of the air conditioning at night. At first, I mistook that for love. Then it started to look like something else.

Like surveillance.

He insisted on doing all my exams in his own private practice. Always with the same excuse.

“I don’t want another man to examine you.

And I, in love, wanted to believe that this was romanticism, not control.

But Ricardo was not the only thing that worried me.

There was also Helena, his mother.

In public, she was sweet, flawless, almost perfect. In private, she showed up every day with strange-smelling herbal tonics, touched my belly with an intimacy that made me cringe inside, and said things that didn’t sound like a future grandmother.

One afternoon, she rested her hand on my belly, smiled without any warmth and murmured:

“We have to take good care of this asset.

Active.