This book was written because a child died.

There is No Heartbeat begins at the moment when a pregnancy ends with death, and continues through everything that does not end afterward: life that has to recover from a birth without a living baby.

It follows a mother through stillbirth, silent postpartum, pregnancy after loss, repeated hospitalization, emergency decisions, NICU, and the fragile, exhausting work of keeping another child alive. There is no attempt to find meaning in what happened. There is no lesson.

This book is not about grief as an idea. It is about what grief does to someone's life to trust, to the way a person continue on living. It is about learning how to live when vigilance has become permanent.

There is No Heartbeat does not offer hope. This book does not try to help.
It just tells the truth.