On the way to the hospital for an abortion, someone pressed a survey into my hands.
【If you could go back to any moment in time, when would it be?】
I thought for a few seconds, then wrote my answer in careful letters.
【I wish I could go back to the day of the massive Capital City chain car accident and stop the doctors from saving me.】
The girl beside me read what I'd written and blurted out in shock.
“I heard only nine people survived that accident. Why would you want to stop the doctors from saving you?”
I pressed my hand to my chest, over the transplanted heart beating beneath my ribs, and looked up at the mall's largest screen.
It was playing footage of Gabriel Henson dropping millions on a sapphire ring for a Westgate Film Academy student.
Everyone envied her, the girl who'd brought Capital City's most powerful man to his knees.
But no one knew the child I was about to terminate was his.
I handed the survey back to the girl and forced a smile.
“I was supposed to die that day.”
Back then, the doctor had mistaken me for Gabriel Henson's sister and cut her heart out of her chest to give it to me.
I'd lived with that heart for three years.
Gabriel had hated me for every one of them.
It was time to give it back.
——
The girl stared at me, stunned into silence.
Her lips parted several times before she finally managed to speak.
“It wasn't your fault, though.”
“Don't blame yourself so much. What's done is done!”
“You have to look forward!”
After those few words of comfort, she couldn't help asking one more thing.
“Did the girl's brother ever come after you?”
I shook my head, a bitter smile ghosting across my lips.
Gabriel hadn't come after me. Not at first. He'd done the opposite, comforting me more times than I could count.
Every night I spent drowning in guilt, he caught the red-eye from Wall Street just to be by my side.
When the medication made me throw up until there was nothing left, he drove twenty miles in the middle of the night to buy my favorite shortbread cookies.
I thought Gabriel Henson loved me.
Then came our first anniversary, and he brought another woman home.
After they were done in our bed, he looked at me with those cold, flat eyes while I sobbed until I couldn't breathe.
“Jessica Pruitt, if you and Bridget Henson hadn't swapped jackets that day, the doctor never would have mixed you up. He never would have cut her heart out and given it to you.”
“Bridget was sheltered her whole life. She'd cry over the smallest scratch. Do you have any idea how much pain she was in when she died?”
“Jessica Pruitt, you're going to spend the rest of your life atoning for what happened to Bridget.”
Gabriel's vengeance, when it finally came, was savage.
After that night, he brought women home constantly and forced me to watch every second of it.
He let those women hurt me, again and again.
They locked me in a sauna for three days and three nights.
They tied weights to my legs and threw me into a frozen lake……
Three years, and I was done.
If Gabriel Henson hated me so much for taking Bridget's heart, then fine.
I'd give it back.
Clutching the signed abortion consent form, I walked into the hospital where I'd already tried twice to schedule the heart removal surgery.
The doctor frowned the moment he saw me and refused on the spot.
“Miss Pruitt, I've told you before. You're still pregnant. We can't perform a heart removal while you're carrying a child.”
I didn't argue. I set the abortion consent form on his desk.
“I'm having the abortion today.”
“It won't interfere with the heart removal.”
“But……once we replace it with an artificial heart, you'll only have a year to live. Why put yourself through this?!”
“And the father has a right to know! Did he agree to the abortion?”
Would Gabriel agree?
The doctor's words pulled me back to a few days earlier.
I'd been so excited, clutching my ultrasound results, rushing to find Gabriel.
Instead, I overheard one of his friends asking him something.
If I got pregnant, would he still keep punishing me?
Gabriel went still for a few seconds. Then he tipped his head back and laughed.
