The door opened again.
I heard heels on linoleum. Sharp, confident clicks that didn't belong in a delivery room. The nurses looked up. One of them started to say something about restricted access, but the words died in her throat.
Tiffany Gomez walked to my bedside like she was arriving at a restaurant reservation.
She wore a cream cashmere sweater. Her hair was down, glossy and perfect. The bandage on her knee was small and neat, barely visible beneath her designer jeans. She looked at me the way you look at something you've already purchased, just waiting for delivery.
"Ensley," she said. Her voice was warm. Almost kind. "I wanted to thank you personally."
I couldn't move. The drugs had turned my body into something distant and unresponsive. I could only stare.
She pulled a chair closer and sat down. Crossed her legs carefully, protecting the bandaged knee. "I know this must be difficult for you. But I want you to know how much this means to me. Your sacrifice. It's really beautiful, in a way."
Dr. Chen stepped forward. "Ma'am, you can't be in here—"
"It's fine," Tiffany said without looking at him. "Luka said I could visit."
She turned back to me. Smiled. "He talks about you sometimes, you know. When we're together. He says you're like furniture—useful, but he'd never notice if someone replaced you." She tilted her head. "I used to feel bad about that. But then I realized you were doing it to yourself. Shrinking down. Making yourself smaller and smaller until there was almost nothing left."
My chest wouldn't expand. The monitor above my head was screaming but the sound felt very far away.
"The leukemia was my idea," she continued, conversational. "I researched it for months. Medical records aren't that hard to forge if you know the right people. And Luka—" She laughed softly. "He wanted so badly to save me. To be needed like that. You never needed him, Ensley. Not the way I do."
She reached out and touched my hand. Her fingers were warm and dry.
"Your marrow is going to keep me alive," she said. "Isn't that poetic? A part of you, inside me, forever. You'll never really be gone."
I tried to speak. My mouth moved. Nothing came out.
Tiffany stood. Smoothed her sweater. "I should go. Luka's waiting for me. But I wanted you to know—I'm grateful. Really."
She took three steps toward the door.
Then she threw herself to the floor.
The sound was sharp. Theatrical. Her body hit the tile and she screamed—high and broken and terrified. "She pushed me! Oh god, she attacked me, someone help—"
Two nurses rushed in from the hallway. They found Tiffany on the ground, clutching her side, sobbing into her hands. They found me motionless on the bed, blood pooling beneath my hips, my hand still lying where she'd touched it.
"She shoved me," Tiffany gasped. "I was just—I was just trying to talk to her and she—"
One nurse knelt beside her. The other looked at me, at the monitors, at the obvious impossibility of what Tiffany was claiming. But in the chaos, in the noise, in the split second before anyone could process what was real, the door slammed open again.
Luka.
He took in the scene in one sweeping glance. Tiffany on the floor. Me on the bed. He didn't look at the monitors. Didn't look at Dr. Chen. Didn't ask a single question.
He crossed the room in three strides and shoved me.
Both hands. Full force. My body slammed into the metal rail of the bed. The impact rang through my spine, my skull, my ribs. Something inside me tore. Something fundamental and irreplaceable. The alarms went from screaming to shrieking. A cascade of sound that meant everything was ending all at once.
Dr. Chen burst through the door. He looked at the monitors and his face went white. "Placental abruption—massive—get the crash cart, get it NOW—"
Nurses were running. Hands on my body. Voices shouting medical terms I didn't understand. But I understood the silence beneath the noise. The terrible, absolute silence of a heartbeat that had stopped.
The baby.
Our baby.
Gone.
I turned my head on the pillow. Luka was standing in the middle of the room, staring at his hands. They were shaking. Just slightly. He opened his mouth. Closed it. Said nothing.
Tiffany was being helped to her feet by a nurse, still crying, still performing. No one was looking at me anymore. No one except Dr. Chen, and his eyes were full of something I didn't have a name for.
I felt it then. The thing inside me that had been bending and bending for seven years—the part of me that had loved this man, that had believed in him, that had sacrificed everything to keep him—it snapped.
Not with rage. Not with grief.
With silence.
A vast, cold, absolute silence that spread through my chest like winter. The woman who had signed that consent form was gone. The woman who had begged him to save the baby was gone. The woman who had loved Luka Reed with every atom of her diminished self was gone.
What was left was something else entirely.
Something that knew, with perfect clarity, exactly what came next.
