Dr. Salinas turned the monitor thirty degrees toward Paula.
“Seventeen weeks and two days means conception occurred in the first week of November,” Dr. Salinas said, her voice dropping into an icy, surgical register. “Precisely two and a half months *before* the date you claim you underwent a vasectomy.”
Paula took half a step backward, her manicured hand slipping off Diego’s sleeve.
Diego’s face did not pale; it flushed an ugly, mottled crimson that spread upward from beneath his starch-stiffened shirt collar. He lunged toward the console, his fingers slamming against the plastic housing of the monitor:
“You’re lying! You’re falsifying this report because you’re her doctor! You women always protect each other! I paid for an independent surgical vasectomy at the St. Jude Men’s Health Clinic on January 15th! I have the surgical bill in my briefcase! She got pregnant by someone else and she’s trying to pin the timeline on me to keep the house!”
“Diego,” Dr. Salinas said, her voice remaining perfectly even, her thumb pressing a single red button on the keyboard.
*PRINT.*
The thermal printer beneath the desk purred, spitting out an eight-inch photographic strip of the fetal scan with the time-stamped metadata permanently burned into the margin.
“I have not finished showing you the screen,” Dr. Salinas said.
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Dr. Salinas adjusted the color Doppler flow on the machine.
Instantly, the gray-and-white image of the womb was illuminated by pulsing ribbons of bright red and deep indigo, tracing the arterial blood flow through the umbilical cord and the uterine walls.
“Look at the lower left quadrant of the endometrium, Mr. Diego,” Dr. Salinas instructed, pointing the plastic tip of her pen toward a distinct, dark, crescent-shaped shadow resting two centimeters beneath the primary gestational sac.
Diego stared. His breath was coming in short, ragged puffs that fogged the glass of his wristwatch. “What is that? A cyst? An infection from her cheating?”
“No,” Dr. Salinas said. “That is an organized subchorionic hematoma, measuring four point two centimeters across. But more importantly… look at the tissue density within the surrounding muscular layer.”
Dr. Salinas zoomed in on the uterine wall.
