The door opened.
I heard it before I saw it. The soft click of the latch. The measured footsteps. Not running. Not urgent. Just steady, unhurried, like someone arriving to a meeting that had been scheduled weeks in advance.
Luka.
He stood in the doorway for a moment, backlit by the harsh fluorescent hallway lights. His scrubs were clean. Pressed. No coffee stains. No blood. He carried a clipboard under one arm, and his face had that particular expression I'd seen a thousand times before—the one he used with difficult families. Patient. Reasonable. Faintly disappointed that he had to explain something so obvious.
Dr. Chen looked up from the monitor. His jaw went tight.
"Dr. Reed. We paged you forty minutes ago."
Luka didn't look at him. He walked to my bedside and set the clipboard down on the tray table. The metal legs scraped against the floor. The sound made my teeth hurt.
"Ensley," he said. His voice was soft. Gentle, even. "I need you to focus for a moment."
I tried to lift my head. The room tilted. The ceiling lights smeared into long white streaks. I could taste copper in my mouth.
"Luka—" My voice cracked. "The baby—"
"I know." He picked up the clipboard and turned it toward me. A form. Dense black text. Lines at the bottom waiting for a signature. "But we need to handle this first. It's important."
I blinked. The words swam. *Bone marrow donor consent form.* I read it three times before it made sense. Before any of it made sense.
"Tiffany requires a transplant," Luka said. He was still using that voice. The one that made you feel like you were being unreasonable for not understanding immediately. "Her leukemia has progressed. You've been identified as a potential match. We need your consent to move forward with the donation process."
The monitor above my head beeped. Steady. Relentless. I couldn't feel my legs anymore. Couldn't feel anything below my waist except a spreading coldness that was crawling up my spine.
"Now?" I whispered. "You want me to—now?"
"The timing is unfortunate," Luka said. "But the window for viability is narrow. If we wait, we lose the opportunity entirely."
Dr. Chen stepped forward. His hands were shaking. "Dr. Reed, your wife is in critical condition. We need to—"
"I'm aware of her condition, Dr. Chen." Luka didn't raise his voice. He didn't need to. "Which is why we need to expedite this process. Ensley, I need your signature."
I stared at the form. At the pen he was holding out to me. At his hand, steady and clean, no tremor at all.
"The baby," I said again. My throat was closing. "Save the baby first. Please. Luka, please—"
He set the pen down on the clipboard. Leaned in closer. His face filled my vision. I could see the tiny scar above his left eyebrow, the one from a childhood fall he'd told me about on our third date. I'd kissed it once. I'd thought it was the most vulnerable thing about him.
"Sign the form," he said quietly, "and I'll authorize the emergency C-section. Refuse, and I'll make sure no surgeon in this hospital touches you tonight."
The words didn't land right away. They hovered in the air between us, sharp and impossible, like something spoken in a language I'd never learned.
Dr. Chen made a sound. A strangled, disbelieving sound.
Luka picked up the pen and pressed it into my hand. His fingers were warm. Familiar. I'd held this hand across a thousand dinner tables. I'd held it the night he proposed.
"Ensley," he said. "Sign."
I couldn't breathe. The room was spinning. The monitor was screaming. Somewhere inside me, something was tearing, something vital and irreplaceable, and I didn't know if it was my body or my heart or both.
I signed.
My hand shook so badly the letters were barely legible. The pen slipped. Blood smeared across the page—my blood, from the IV line they'd torn out when they'd tried to move me earlier. Red streaks across white paper. Across Tiffany's name. Across the line that said *donor consent.*
Luka took the clipboard. Folded the form once, precisely, and slipped it into his coat pocket.
Then he checked his phone.
I watched him. The morphine made everything slow and distant, but I saw it. The way his thumb moved across the screen. The faint glow lighting his face from below. He typed something. Sent it. Slid the phone back into his pocket.
He didn't move toward the door. Didn't call for Dr. Chen. Didn't reach for the phone on the wall to authorize anything.
He just stood there.
And I understood.
I understood with a clarity that cut through the blood loss and the drugs and the pain. The signature had never been the point. The C-section was never coming. He had taken what he needed, and now he was waiting for me to stop being a problem.
I opened my mouth. No sound came out. My vision was narrowing, the room collapsing into a single bright point of light, and in that light I saw my husband's face, calm and composed, watching me die.
The last thing I thought, before the darkness took me, was that I should have called my mother seven years ago.
