The woman deputy’s name was Ortez.
\nI learned this because she said it three times in the first thirty seconds, as though repetition might make the next words easier to hear.
\n“Ma’am, my name is Deputy Ortez. I need you to come with me right now. Ma’am, my name is Deputy Ortez. We’re moving you to a secure location. Ma’am, my name is Deputy Ortez, and I need you to trust me for the next four minutes.”
\nFour minutes.
\nAgain.
\nThe number followed me like a shadow. Four minutes until the deputies reached the yard. Four minutes until the ambulance pulled away from the house. Four minutes until the next thing happened.
\nI sat up.
\nThe movement sent a spike through my lower back, and the baby shifted in protest, a slow roll that pressed against my ribs. My hands gripped the bed rail. The hospital gown gaped at the shoulder where they had cut my shirt open. The bandage on my neck pulled tight.
\n“My shoes,” I said. My voice was still thin. Still scraped. But it came out steady.
\nOrtez grabbed them from under the bed. Held them while I stepped into them. The socks were still too large. My left foot still tingled. But I stood.
\nThe officer from the hallway stepped inside. His face was tight. His hand rested on his radio. He spoke into it low, fast, in the compressed language of people coordinating movement.
\n“Room 412, relocating now. Need corridor clear. East stairwell to loading dock. Unit Twelve meets us at the vehicle.”
\n“Copy.”
\nOrtez took my arm. Not gripping. Guiding. Her hand warm and steady beneath my elbow.
\n“Can you walk?”
\n“Yes.”
\n“Then walk. Don’t run. Don’t look at anyone in the hallway. If I say stop, you stop. If I say get down, you get down. Understand?”
\nI nodded.
\nShe opened the door.
\nThe hallway stretched in both directions, lit by the dimmed nighttime fluorescents. Empty. The squeak of shoes somewhere far off. The murmur of a television behind a closed door. The ordinary sounds of a hospital settling into its night shift.
\nNothing that looked like a threat.
\nBut the threat had come through a phone. Through three relay points. In a voice that knew my room number. That knew the hospital name. That knew about the baby.
\nWe moved.
\nOrtez on my left. The officer on my right. My hand pressed against my stomach, feeling the shape of the baby beneath the gown. The IV was still in my hand, the tape peeling, the thin tube trailing behind me like a tether to the bed I had just left.
\nOrtez saw it.
\nShe stopped. Pulled a small pair of scissors from her belt. Cut the tube clean. Pressed a gauze pad over the needle site and held it with two fingers.
\n“Keep pressure on that,” she said. “We’ll deal with the rest at the other end.”
\nI pressed the gauze to the back of my hand.
\nWe walked.
\nThe east stairwell was concrete and cold. My shoes scuffed on each step. The baby jostled with every descent, a slow rocking that was almost soothing if I did not think about why we were moving. If I did not think about the voice on the phone saying *the baby is the leverage.*
\nThree flights down. A heavy door. A loading dock lit by a single buzzing fixture. The night air hit me, cool and carrying the smell of exhaust and damp asphalt.
\nA black SUV waited. Engine running. No markings. The windows tinted.<\/p>\n
Ortez opened the back door.<\/p>\n
“Get in. Lie down if you can. Stay below the window line until I say otherwise.”<\/p>\n
I climbed in. The seat was leather, cold through the thin gown. I lay back, pulling my knees up, pressing my hand over the curve of my stomach. The baby was still. Listening. Waiting.<\/p>\n
The officer got in the front. Ortez took the driver’s seat. The door closed.<\/p>\n
The SUV pulled away.<\/p>\n
No siren. No lights. Just the hum of the engine and the tires on wet pavement and the hospital shrinking in the side mirror until it was a rectangle of lit windows and then nothing.<\/p>\n
I stared at the ceiling of the vehicle.<\/p>\n
“Where are we going?” I asked.<\/p>\n
“Somewhere with a different name and a different entrance,” Ortez said. “Somewhere that isn’t in the county system. Somewhere Gerald Fisk didn’t map during his twenty-two years.”<\/p>\n
I closed my eyes.<\/p>\n
The drive lasted twenty minutes. Maybe twenty-five. I lost track. The baby shifted once, twice, then settled. My hand stayed pressed over the shape of it. The gauze on my wrist grew damp with blood. I held it tighter.<\/p>\n
The SUV slowed. Turned. Slowed again.<\/p>\n
A gate opened\u2014I heard the mechanical whine of it, the click of a lock releasing.<\/p>\n
Then we stopped.<\/p>\n
Ortez opened my door.<\/p>\n
“We’re here.”<\/p>\n
I sat up.<\/p>\n
The building was low. Brick. No sign. A single entrance with a steel door and a camera above it. The parking lot held three vehicles, all unmarked. A chain-link fence surrounded the perimeter, topped with wire that caught the light from a single streetlamp.<\/p>\n
Not a hospital.<\/p>\n
Not a house.<\/p>\n
Something between. Something designed for the in-between state I occupied. Not free. Not captive. Protected.<\/p>\n
Ortez helped me out. My legs shook. The left foot tingled harder now, the nerves firing in confused bursts as though they could not decide whether they were waking or dying.<\/p>\n
Inside, the hallway was short and warm. Beige walls. Linoleum floors. A reception desk with no one behind it. Two doors on the left. Three on the right. The air smelled like coffee and industrial cleaner.<\/p>\n
A woman met us at the end of the hall. Mid-forties. Scrubs under a cardigan. Hair pulled back in a clip. She carried a clipboard and a blood pressure cuff and looked at me with the particular steadiness of someone who had seen things go wrong many times and had learned not to flinch.<\/p>\n
“I’m Dr. Luan,” she said. “You’re safe here. No one comes in without clearance. No one leaves without escort. Your room is at the end of the hall. We’ll get you settled, check the baby, and then we’ll talk about what you need.”<\/p>\n
I followed her.<\/p>\n
The room was small. A bed. A chair. A window with bars on the outside and curtains on the inside. A bathroom with a lock that worked. A phone on the nightstand.<\/p>\n
The curtains were closed.<\/p>\n
I stood in the center of the room and looked at the walls. Solid. Painted. No mud. No insects. No porch light.<\/p>\n
I breathed.<\/p>\n
The baby pressed against my ribs. Slow. Steady.<\/p>\n
Dr. Luan helped me into the bed. Checked the gauze on my wrist. Replaced it with fresh tape. Took my blood pressure. Listened to the baby with a handheld monitor, the heartbeat filling the small room like a drum.<\/p>\n
“Strong,” she said. Same word as the first doctor. Same relief.<\/p>\n
She left me with water and a blanket and a promise to return in an hour.<\/p>\n
The door closed.<\/p>\n
I lay in the dark.<\/p>\n
And I waited.<\/p>\n
Not for footsteps. Not for porch boards. Not for the sound of a pitcher filling.<\/p>\n
I waited for the other shoe. Because the voice on the phone had said *before the lawyers do.* And lawyers meant paperwork. And paperwork meant systems. And systems were the thing Gerald Fisk had spent twenty-two years learning to navigate.<\/p>\n
The lawyers came at six in the morning.<\/p>\n
Not to me. To the county courthouse, three miles from the brick building where I lay in a bed with bars on the outside of the window. Vasquez called me on the phone beside the nightstand. His voice carried the particular exhaustion of a man who had not slept since the night before.<\/p>\n
“Your husband’s attorney filed an emergency motion at five a.m.,” he said. “Custody claim. Parental rights.”<\/p>\n
I sat up.<\/p>\n
The baby stirred.<\/p>\n
“He’s claiming you’re mentally unfit,” Vasquez continued. “He’s citing a history of ’emotional instability during pregnancy.’ He’s requesting temporary custody of the child upon birth. He’s asking the court to place the baby with his mother pending evaluation.”<\/p>\n
The words landed one by one.<\/p>\n
Mentally unfit.<\/p>\n
Emotional instability.<\/p>\n
The same language he had used for months. The same story he had rehearsed for neighbors, for family, for anyone who might ask why I looked tired or quiet or afraid. *She gets confused when she’s upset. The pregnancy is making her emotional. She doesn’t always remember things correctly.*<\/p>\n
He had built the cage out of words long before he built it out of dirt.<\/p>\n
“The recordings,” I said.<\/p>\n
“They’re authenticated. The audio files, the dispatch call, the body-cam footage from the deputies. All of it is in evidence. But his attorney is arguing the recordings are ‘contextually ambiguous.’ That you were ‘participating in a voluntary grounding exercise’ and ‘became confused about the nature of the interaction.'”<\/p>\n
My hand tightened on the phone.<\/p>\n
“He’s arguing I buried myself.”<\/p>\n
“He’s arguing you consented. And that the phone call was made in a state of ‘pregnancy-related panic.’ He’s citing medical literature on hormonal changes. He’s citing your prenatal records, which note an anxiety screening in your second trimester.”<\/p>\n
I remembered that screening. A form. A series of questions. *Do you feel worried more days than not? Do you have trouble sleeping? Do you feel unable to stop or control worrying?*<\/p>\n
I had answered honestly because I believed the answers would stay in a medical file. Because I believed the system worked the way it was supposed to.<\/p>\n
He had weaponized my honesty.<\/p>\n
“What do I do?” I asked.<\/p>\n
Vasquez paused.<\/p>\n
“You don’t do anything tonight. The motion is filed, but it’s not granted. It goes before a judge. We have seventy-two hours to respond. I’m building the opposition brief with the DA’s office. The recordings. The dispatch audio. Mara’s testimony. Fisk’s phone records. The text about the back lot. The photo his mother sent.”<\/p>\n
“And if the judge believes him?”<\/p>\n
Another pause.<\/p>\n
“The judge will not believe him.”<\/p>\n
But he said it the way people say things they need to be true. Not the way they say things that are certain.<\/p>\n
“Detective.”<\/p>\n
“Ma’am.”<\/p>\n
“The anonymous call. The one that told them where I was. Room 412. St. Mary’s. Have you traced it?”<\/p>\n
Silence. Longer this time.<\/p>\n
“We traced the routing,” Vasquez said carefully. “Three relay points. Two in-state. One in the next county over. The final relay was a burner phone purchased at a gas station off Route 9. Cash. No cameras covering the register.”<\/p>\n
“So you don’t know who called.”<\/p>\n
“I know who *didn’t* call. It wasn’t your husband. He was in a holding cell with no phone access. It wasn’t his mother. Same. It wasn’t Fisk. Same.”<\/p>\n
“Then who?”<\/p>\n
Vasquez exhaled.<\/p>\n
“That’s what’s keeping me up. Because whoever made that call knew your room number. Knew you were at St. Mary’s. Knew about the baby. And knew the lawyers were coming. Which means they’re inside the system. Or they were, until very recently.”<\/p>\n
The system.<\/p>\n
Fisk’s system. Twenty-two years of knowing which doors opened where. Which patrol routes covered which streets. Which response times to calculate. Which records to access.<\/p>\n
He had retired four years ago.<\/p>\n
But systems did not retire. They accumulated. They left residue. They built networks of people who owed favors, who remembered allegiances, who still answered the phone when a familiar voice called.<\/p>\n
“Be careful,” Vasquez said. “I’ve got Ortez posted outside your door tonight. No one gets in without two forms of ID and a verbal confirmation from me personally. You don’t open that door for anyone else. Not a nurse. Not a janitor. Not someone who says they’re from the DA’s office. You call me first. Every time.”<\/p>\n
“I understand.”<\/p>\n
“And the baby. If anyone asks about the baby, you say nothing. You say you need to call me. You do not give information. You do not confirm or deny. You do not engage.”<\/p>\n
“I understand.”<\/p>\n
He hung up.<\/p>\n
I set the phone down.<\/p>\n
The room was quiet. The curtains were closed. The baby was still.<\/p>\n
I pressed my hand to my stomach and felt the shape of it. The small, persistent life that someone had called *leverage.* As though it were a thing to be used. A card to be played. A point of pressure to be applied until I bent.<\/p>\n
They had buried me in dirt.<\/p>\n
They had poured water around my mouth.<\/p>\n
They had laughed.<\/p>\n
And now they wanted the baby.<\/p>\n
Not because they loved it. Not because they wanted to raise it. But because it was the last point of control. The last lever. The last way to make me sit in a room and perform understanding so they could feel better about what they had done.<\/p>\n
I would not bend.<\/p>\n
The morning passed in fragments.<\/p>\n
Dr. Luan came. Checked the baby. Checked my blood pressure. Checked the numbness in my left foot, which was improving but still present. She said the nerves would heal. She said it might take weeks. She said *might* the way doctors say it when they mean *probably* but cannot guarantee.<\/p>\n
She brought me food. Real food. Eggs. Toast. Fruit. Coffee I could not drink because of the pregnancy but could hold in my hands for the warmth.<\/p>\n
I ate slowly. The act of chewing felt foreign. The act of swallowing without calculating whether the water would reach my mouth or pour past it. The act of eating without watching someone else eat first, perform enjoyment, make me grateful.<\/p>\n
I ate alone.<\/p>\n
And the food tasted like mine.<\/p>\n
At ten, the phone rang.<\/p>\n
I stared at it.<\/p>\n
Vasquez had said to call him before answering. But the phone rang again, and the sound was insistent, and something in me needed to know whether the world was still reaching in or whether the walls had sealed.<\/p>\n
I picked up.<\/p>\n
“Hello?”<\/p>\n
Silence.<\/p>\n
Then breathing. Not mine. Not the dispatcher’s. Not Vasquez’s.<\/p>\n
A woman’s breathing. Shallow. Fast. As though she were trying not to make noise. As though someone might hear her.<\/p>\n
“Who is this?” I asked.<\/p>\n
The breathing continued.<\/p>\n
Then a voice. Low. Rushed. The words pressed out like air through a narrow space.<\/p>\n
“I was there. The second night. I drove past the fence. I saw the porch light. I saw your husband in the yard. I saw the shape of you in the dirt. I slowed down. I almost stopped.”<\/p>\n
My hand tightened on the receiver.<\/p>\n
“I didn’t stop. I kept driving. I told myself it wasn’t what it looked like. I told myself I was seeing things. I told myself it was none of my business.”<\/p>\n
A pause. A shuddering breath.<\/p>\n
“I’m calling because I heard what happened. I heard about the phone. I heard about the deputies. And I need you to know that I saw. I saw you. You were not invisible. You were not imagining it. I saw you in the ground, and I drove away, and I have not slept since.”<\/p>\n
I could not speak.<\/p>\n
“I don’t know if this helps. I don’t know if this changes anything. But I need you to know that someone outside that yard saw you and knew you were real. You were not crazy. You were not confused. You were in the dirt, and I saw you, and I’m sorry I didn’t stop.”<\/p>\n
The line went quiet.<\/p>\n
Then a click.<\/p>\n
Then the dial tone.<\/p>\n
I held the phone to my ear for a long time.<\/p>\n
The baby moved. A slow roll. A press against my ribs.<\/p>\n
I set the phone down.<\/p>\n
And I breathed.<\/p>\n
Not because the call had changed anything. Not because it had fixed what was broken. But because it was the first time, in all the days in the dirt and all the hours since, that someone had said *I saw you* without adding *and you deserved it.*<\/p>\n
I saw you.<\/p>\n
Three words.<\/p>\n
Enough to hold.<\/p>\n
At noon, Ortez knocked.<\/p>\n
She entered with a file folder and a cup of water. Set the water on the nightstand. Sat in the chair.<\/p>\n
“Vasquez asked me to brief you,” she said. “On the Fisk situation.”<\/p>\n
I nodded.<\/p>\n
“Fisk’s lawyer is arguing the texts between Fisk and your husband’s mother are ‘hypothetical discussions.’ That they were ‘speculating’ about land use. That the phrase *handle it* could refer to anything.”<\/p>\n
“And the photo?”<\/p>\n
“The photo of you in the dirt?” Ortez’s jaw tightened. “His lawyer is arguing it was taken ‘out of concern.’ That your husband’s mother was ‘documenting your condition’ to ‘monitor your wellbeing’ during the grounding exercise.”<\/p>\n
I stared at her.<\/p>\n
She stared back.<\/p>\n
“I know,” she said. “I know how it sounds. I know how it looks. And I need you to know that the DA is not accepting that framing. The photo is being entered as evidence of premeditation. The text about the back lot is being entered as evidence of intent to relocate you to an unmonitored area. The phone records establishing Fisk’s involvement in routing patrol schedules are being entered as evidence of obstruction.”<\/p>\n
“But his lawyer will fight.”<\/p>\n
“His lawyer will fight. And we’ll fight back. And it will take time. And it will be ugly. And there will be days when it feels like the system is bending toward them because the system is old and slow and full of people who knew Fisk and owed him favors.”<\/p>\n
She leaned forward.<\/p>\n
“But you have something they don’t.”<\/p>\n
“What?”<\/p>\n
“Truth. Documented. Timestamped. Recorded by your own hand in the dirt while they laughed. And you have Mara. And you have the dispatcher’s logs. And you have the body-cam footage of your husband trying to tell deputies you buried yourself.”<\/p>\n
She stood.<\/p>\n
“It’s going to take time. But it’s going to hold.”<\/p>\n
She left.<\/p>\n
The afternoon stretched.<\/p>\n
The baby moved more in the afternoon. As though the warmth of the room, the food, the stillness, had given it permission. Small pushes. Rolls. A flutter against my ribs that might have been a hand or a foot or an elbow, I could not tell.<\/p>\n
I placed both hands on my stomach and felt the shape of it.<\/p>\n
“You’re here,” I whispered.<\/p>\n
The baby pressed back.<\/p>\n
Not an answer. Not a word. Just pressure. Just presence. Just the small, persistent proof that the thing I had protected with my silence was still alive and still moving and still mine.<\/p>\n
Mine.<\/p>\n
Not leverage.<\/p>\n
Not a card to be played.<\/p>\n
Not a point of pressure.<\/p>\n
Mine.<\/p>\n
At four, the phone rang again.<\/p>\n
I called Vasquez first, as instructed. He answered on the second ring.<\/p>\n
“It’s me,” I said. “The phone is ringing.”<\/p>\n
“Don’t answer it,” he said. “I’ll have Ortez check it.”<\/p>\n
A knock. Ortez’s voice in the hallway. A pause. Then her voice again, speaking to someone I could not hear.<\/p>\n
A minute passed.<\/p>\n
Then Vasquez came back on the line.<\/p>\n
“It was the hospital. St. Mary’s. Their legal department. They’re asking for your medical records to be transferred.”<\/p>\n
“Why?”<\/p>\n
“Because your husband’s attorney subpoenaed them. Prenatal records. Anxiety screening. Therapy notes. Everything from your second trimester onward. He’s building the ‘mental instability’ case.”<\/p>\n
I closed my eyes.<\/p>\n
“Can he do that?”<\/p>\n
“He can request. We can fight. I’m filing a protective order within the hour. Your records will be sealed pending the custody hearing. But I need you to know he’s trying. I need you to know what he’s reaching for.”<\/p>\n
My therapy notes. The ones where I had sat in a small office with a woman who asked gentle questions and I had answered honestly because I believed honesty was safe. Because I believed the words would stay in the room.<\/p>\n
*Do you feel safe at home?*<\/p>\n
I had said yes.<\/p>\n
Because saying no meant explaining. And explaining meant being told I was confused. Emotional. Misremembering. Dramatic.<\/p>\n
I had said yes, and the woman had written it down, and now my husband’s lawyer would pull that file and point to the word *yes* and say, *See? She was fine. She was stable. Whatever happened in that yard was not what she’s claiming.*<\/p>\n
“Detective.”<\/p>\n
“I’m here.”<\/p>\n
“I said yes. In therapy. When she asked if I felt safe. I said yes.”<\/p>\n
Vasquez was quiet for a moment.<\/p>\n
“I know,” he said. “I’ve seen the file. And I know why you said it. And the DA knows. And the judge will know. Saying yes in a therapy office because you’re afraid of what happens if you say no is not consent. It’s not stability. It’s survival.”<\/p>\n
I breathed.<\/p>\n
“You don’t have to carry that,” he said. “You don’t have to explain it. You don’t have to perform understanding for a system that should have believed you the first time.”<\/p>\n
I nodded. Even though he could not see me.<\/p>\n
“Thank you,” I whispered.<\/p>\n
He hung up.<\/p>\n
The evening came. The curtains stayed closed. The baby settled into stillness. Dr. Luan checked the heartbeat one more time before leaving for the night. Strong. Steady. Persistent.<\/p>\n
Ortez posted outside the door.<\/p>\n
I lay in the dark.<\/p>\n
And I thought about the woman on the phone. The one who had driven past the fence. Who had seen the porch light and the shape in the dirt and slowed down and kept going.<\/p>\n
*I saw you. You were not invisible.*<\/p>\n
I thought about the dispatcher. The voice in the dirt. *Keep him talking.*<\/p>\n
I thought about Mara, stepping toward the phone instead of away from it.<\/p>\n
I thought about my husband, crouching beside me, asking me to say I understood why it happened.<\/p>\n
I thought about his mother, standing in the doorway, waiting to see which way the wind blew.<\/p>\n
I thought about Gerald Fisk, sitting in a cell with twenty-two years of system knowledge and a phone full of texts about back lots and patrol routes.<\/p>\n
I thought about the anonymous voice. *The baby is the leverage. Get to her before the lawyers do.*<\/p>\n
And I thought about the word *leverage.*<\/p>\n
How they had used it. How they would use it. How they would reach for the smallest, most vulnerable thing in my body and try to make it into a tool.<\/p>\n
I pressed my hand to my stomach.<\/p>\n
The baby was warm beneath my palm. Turning slow. Settling.<\/p>\n
I would not let them.<\/p>\n
Not the husband. Not the mother. Not the lawyer. Not the judge. Not Fisk. Not the system that had carried them all like a current carries debris.<\/p>\n
I would not let them.<\/p>\n
The night deepened.<\/p>\n
The building was quiet.<\/p>\n
The baby breathed inside me.<\/p>\n
I breathed outside it.<\/p>\n
And somewhere across the county, in a courthouse with marble floors and locked doors and a judge who had not yet read the file, a motion sat on a desk. A custody claim. A parental rights filing. A stack of paper that argued I was confused, unstable, emotional, unfit.<\/p>\n
And somewhere else, in a cell with concrete walls, my husband sat with his lawyer and rehearsed the next version. The next performance. The next careful, patient voice for a room full of strangers who might believe him if the story was smooth enough.<\/p>\n
And somewhere else, his mother sat in her own cell and demanded to speak to someone who would listen. Who would believe her. Who would agree that this was family business. That I had done something to deserve it. That the punishment was proportionate. That I was ungrateful.<\/p>\n
And somewhere else, Gerald Fisk sat with his lawyer and said nothing. Because silence was the last system he knew. The last tool. The last way to make the truth wait long enough for the lie to set.<\/p>\n
And somewhere else, Mara sat in a friend’s house with red eyes and a phone she had surrendered and a statement she had given and a courtroom date she was dreading.<\/p>\n
And somewhere else, a woman who had driven past a fence at midnight lay awake in her own bed and stared at her ceiling and replayed the shape she had seen in the dirt.<\/p>\n
And I lay in a room with bars on the outside of the window.<\/p>\n
And the baby turned.<\/p>\n
And the night held.<\/p>\n
And in the morning, the hearing would begin.<\/p>\n
And I would have to walk into a courtroom and sit across from the man who had buried me and look a judge in the eye and say, in my own voice, what had happened.<\/p>\n
Not through a straw.<\/p>\n
Not through a freezer bag.<\/p>\n
Not through a dispatcher’s calm, steady line.<\/p>\n
Through my own mouth.<\/p>\n
And the words would have to be enough.<\/p>\n
They would have to be.<\/p>\n
But the night was not over.<\/p>\n
Because at two in the morning, Ortez knocked again.<\/p>\n
Soft. Urgent.<\/p>\n
I opened the door.<\/p>\n
Her face was pale.<\/p>\n
“There’s been a development,” she said. “Vasquez needs you to hear this before morning. He’s on his way.”<\/p>\n
“What development?”<\/p>\n
She hesitated. Looked down the hallway. Looked back at me.<\/p>\n
“The anonymous caller. The one who called in your location. We pulled the voiceprint. Ran it against county employee records. Current and former.”<\/p>\n
My stomach dropped.<\/p>\n
“It matched,” Ortez said. “The voice belongs to someone currently employed at St. Mary’s Hospital. Someone who had access to your intake file. Your room number. Your medical notes.”<\/p>\n
“Who?”<\/p>\n
Ortez swallowed.<\/p>\n
“The head nurse. The one who admitted you. The one who took your vitals. The one who asked you how many weeks pregnant you were and wrote it down and smiled.”<\/p>\n
The room went cold.<\/p>\n
The baby kicked.<\/p>\n
Hard.<\/p>\n
And the night rearranged itself again…<\/p>\n
The woman deputy’s name was Ortez. I learned this because she said it three times in the first thirty seconds, as though repetition might make the next words easier to … <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4139,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4216","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-story"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nexttaleus.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4216","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nexttaleus.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nexttaleus.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nexttaleus.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nexttaleus.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4216"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/nexttaleus.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4216\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4219,"href":"https:\/\/nexttaleus.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4216\/revisions\/4219"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nexttaleus.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/4139"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nexttaleus.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4216"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nexttaleus.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4216"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nexttaleus.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4216"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}