I woke up to white. White ceiling, white walls, white light so bright it felt like it was scraping the inside of my skull. Someone was talking nearby, low and professional, words I couldn't quite catch through the ringing in my ears.
I tried to move my hand. It pulled against something — tubing, tape, the cold bite of an IV line threaded into my wrist. The pain came next, a dull throb at the base of my skull that sharpened the moment I tried to turn my head.
"Mrs. Hunt." A woman's voice, close now. I blinked until her face came into focus — middle-aged, tired eyes, scrubs printed with cartoon reindeer. A nurse. "You're at Mount Sinai. You've been here two days. Do you remember what happened?"
Two days.
I opened my mouth. Nothing came out at first, just a rasp like something had scraped my throat raw. "The overpass," I managed finally. "I fell."
"You hemorrhaged," she said gently, adjusting something on the monitor beside my bed. "They had to do emergency surgery. You lost a lot of blood."
I looked down at my stomach. Still flat under the thin hospital gown, but emptier now, hollow in a way that had nothing to do with hunger. I didn't need to ask. I already knew.
"The baby?" I said it anyway, because some part of me needed to hear it spoken out loud, needed the words to make it real.
Her face softened in that practiced way nurses have, the look they save for delivering news no one wants to hear. "I'm so sorry."
I turned my head toward the window. Snow was still falling outside, soft and silent, like the world hadn't noticed anything had changed at all.
"Is my husband here?" I asked. My voice sounded strange, distant, like it was coming from someone else's mouth.
The nurse hesitated. That hesitation told me everything I needed to know before she even opened her mouth. "We've been trying to reach him. His phone goes straight to voicemail. We left messages with his office."
Two days. Forty-eight hours. Enough time for someone to get on a plane from another continent. Enough time for someone who cared to show up.
I closed my eyes. "It's fine," I said. "He's busy."
She didn't argue. She just squeezed my hand once — a stranger's kindness, offered freely, worth more in that moment than five years of vows.
When she left, I stared at the ceiling and counted the tiles. Thirty-six across. I lost count going down. I started over. I needed something to count, something to focus on that wasn't the hollow ache in my chest or the IV drip marking time in my wrist or the fact that I'd woken up alone in a hospital room after losing a baby my husband didn't even know existed.
Flowers arrived on the third day. Not Dominick. Just flowers. Two dozen white roses in a crystal vase, the kind you order from a website without looking at the options, the kind that come with a card printed in generic script.
*Thinking of you. — D*
Not even his handwriting. Not even his voice on the phone to the florist. Just his assistant, probably, checking a task off a list between conference calls.
I looked at the roses for a long time. Then I asked the nurse to move them to another patient's room. Someone who didn't know yet what it meant when the flowers showed up before the person did.
Across town, in the penthouse I still thought of as home, Kylee Boyd was hanging dresses in my closet.
I didn't know that yet. I wouldn't know for another week, not until I came home to find her perfume on my vanity and her shoes by the door and her silk robe on the hook where mine used to hang. But she was already there, moving through my rooms like a woman who'd been promised them, claimed them, earned them somehow by crying at the right moment in front of the right man.
She opened my drawers. She tried on my jewelry. She stood in front of my mirror and smiled at her own reflection, practicing the face she'd wear when Dominick introduced her at the next charity gala, the next board dinner, the next Christmas Eve party where my humiliation would be last year's news and she'd be the woman who replaced me.
She didn't know about the baby either. Dominick hadn't told her. Maybe he didn't know himself yet, or maybe he just didn't think it mattered — another mess cleaned up by lawyers and hospital bills, another problem solved by silence and distance and flowers sent by an assistant who spelled my name wrong on the card.
I lay in my hospital bed and stared at the empty space where the roses had been, and I felt something crack open inside my chest. Not my heart. That had already broken on a frozen overpass two days ago, shattered on impact the moment his taillights disappeared into the snow.
This was something else. Something colder. Something that didn't hurt anymore because it had stopped feeling altogether.
The nurse came back with discharge papers on the fifth day. "Is someone coming to pick you up?" she asked.
I looked at my phone. No missed calls. No texts. Just a voicemail from his assistant confirming the flowers had been delivered and asking if I needed anything else.
"I'll take a cab," I said.
She frowned, the way people frown when they want to argue but know it won't change anything. "You really shouldn't be alone right now."
I smiled. I'd practiced that smile for five years, the one that made people stop asking questions. "I'll be fine," I said.
And I would be. Eventually. Just not in any way Dominick Hunt would recognize.
