The midwife didn’t raise her voice. She lowered herself beside me, careful not to pull me upright, while tissue paper rasped beneath my palm and the edge of the tablecloth brushed her sleeve. “Don’t move yet,” she said.

The midwife didn’t raise her voice. She lowered herself beside me, careful not to pull me upright, while tissue paper rasped beneath my palm and the edge of the tablecloth brushed her sleeve.

“Don’t move yet,” she said.

She looked at the blood beneath my bandage. She looked at my swollen belly. She looked at my husband. She did not look away.

My mother-in-law folded her arms. “She was told to keep moving. She’s been sitting around all day making everyone wait.”

The midwife reached beneath the gift table and lifted the hanging cloth.

My wheelchair was there.

It had been turned sideways behind stacked gifts, the brakes locked, one handle wedged close to the wall so I couldn’t have reached it from the floor.

Thirty relatives stopped pretending not to watch. A woman holding folded napkins lowered her hands. Someone near the doorway shifted aside so the chair was fully visible. Even the conversations from the far side of the room died down as the midwife pulled the wheelchair into the open and turned it toward me.

My husband stepped forward.

“I moved it because she was making a scene.”

The midwife’s hand stopped on the wheelchair handle. “You moved her chair?”

“Temporarily.”

“After she was discharged with mobility restrictions?”

He said I was making a scene. He said I had been told to exercise. He said I had refused the chair myself. He did not look at me when he said the last one.

I finally found enough breath to speak.

“He took it.”

My husband’s head snapped toward me.

I kept going. “He said I could have it back after I apologized for ruining the pictures.”

My mother-in-law cut in immediately. “That is not what happened. She wouldn’t cooperate. I barely touched her ankle.”

The midwife glanced at the red spreading beneath the bandage.

“Barely?”

My mother-in-law’s mouth tightened.

The midwife crouched beside the wheelchair again and checked its position, then looked at my discharge bracelet. “A patient on strict mobility restrictions does not get ordered to crawl across a floor for photographs.”

My husband tried to interrupt.

She raised one hand.

“No.”

For the first time that afternoon, someone had told him no before he could finish rewriting what had happened.

Then the midwife turned toward the woman still clutching my hospital bag.

“I need her discharge paperwork.”

My husband reached for the bag first. “I can explain what the doctor said.”

The midwife kept her hand extended toward his mistress instead.