In elite high society, everyone knew Cicely Sanchez loved me with something close to devotion.
A woman that proud, that cold, and yet every single year she went to the child foot of the snowy mountains to pray for me, a full month at a time.
For the longest time, I believed I was the luckiest man alive.
Until the day I scrolled past a video.
My best friend, Connor Delgado, holding a child, smiling into the camera as he said:
"This is exactly where we were climbing the mountain that year, when we got carried away, and then we had our baby."
"So every year, we come back to thank the heavens."
The next second, a woman's hand reached in from off-screen to tuck in his scarf where the wind had loosened it.
The gesture was tender. Practiced.
But on that wrist sat the safety knot I had woven for Cicely with my own two hands.
I was sitting in a room with the heat turned up high, yet inch by inch, the blood went cold in my body.
Right then, the doctor pushed the door open.
"Mr. Winfield, the results are in."
"The samples you and Ms. Sanchez froze last time show very high viability. Conception is very likely to succeed."
I lifted my head, dazed.
At some point, without my noticing, tears had already covered my face.
"I need you to cancel the fertility plan with Cicely Sanchez."
"And the frozen samples. Destroy them too."
——
The doctor froze.
"Mr. Winfield, are you sure?"
"Ms. Sanchez loves you so much. This child, haven't the two of you been hoping for it for so long?"
She was probably trying to talk me out of it.
After all, all of elite high society knew that Cicely Sanchez had once taken nineteen knife blows meant for me from an attacker.
That when I lay dying, she had dropped a ten-billion-dollar project to go alone to the foot of the snowy mountains, bowing to the ground with every step.
A love that vast. The kind everyone envied.
But in that moment, I couldn't get a single full sentence out.
My throat felt like it was being cut, my heart aching so hard I could barely stay on my feet.
The doctor looked at the tears streaming down my face and finally stopped asking.
She only let out a quiet sigh.
"Then I'll pause the rest of the process for now."
After the door closed, I opened that video again.
My fingertips trembled so badly I could hardly hold the phone.
In the comments, someone had asked with a smile: "How old is the baby? He's so adorable."
Connor had replied fast: "Five years old."
I stared at those words, and a sudden ringing filled my ears.
Five years ago, I'd been gravely injured in a car accident, declared critical by the doctors more than once.
Cicely Sanchez, proud as she was, had rushed to the mountains like she'd lost her mind.
Palms split open from the cold, forehead bloodied from kneeling, begging the heavens to let me live.
Later, I woke up.
Everyone said it was Cicely's devotion that had moved the heavens.
And I believed it too, all this time.
But it turned out that while she knelt at the foot of those mountains praying for me,
she had also tangled herself up with my best friend in the wind and snow.
And even had a child.
The wrenching pain in my chest nearly swallowed me whole.
As the phone screen dimmed, Connor's chat window popped up.
The last message was still the one he'd sent the night before.
"Gilbert Winfield, I really envy you, man."
"A woman like Cicely Sanchez, you can tell at a glance she's so restrained, so gentle."
"Not like my wife. Lately I don't know what's gotten into her."
"Every night she wears me out till my back aches and my legs go weak, and won't stop no matter how I beg."
"She's about to drain me dry."
A few suggestive emojis trailed after it.
Reading those lines now, my stomach suddenly turned.
So the wife he kept talking about was Cicely Sanchez.
My fingers clenched the phone, my vision going black in waves.
In all the years I'd been with Cicely Sanchez, in bed she had always held herself back, almost gentle to a fault.
