“I didn’t find out until tonight,” he said. “Chloe, I swear to you.”
The anesthesiologist stepped beside me. “Ma’am, I need you still.”
But my mind was spiraling too fast now.
I remembered Margaret sitting calmly across from me after discovering the pregnancy.
The coldness in her voice.
The precision.
“You will not tell Ethan.”
At the time, I’d thought it was cruelty.
Now I realized it had been calculation.
“You knew?” I whispered aloud, though she wasn’t there.
Another sharp pain ripped through my abdomen.
Then suddenly—
Warmth.
Too much warmth.
Linda’s face drained of color instantly.
“Blood pressure crashing.”
The room erupted.
“Now, Doctor!”
Ethan’s eyes snapped toward the monitors.
Then back to me.
Everything vulnerable vanished from his expression.
Surgeon again.
But before he stepped away, he bent close enough that his forehead almost touched mine.
And in a voice so raw it nearly shattered me, he whispered:
“If anything happens to you, I will never forgive myself.”
Then they lowered the mask over my face.
The lights above me blurred.
Voices distorted.
My body felt far away suddenly.
But through the haze, I heard one final thing before darkness swallowed me whole.
A woman’s voice screaming in the hallway outside the operating room.
“No—where is my son?!”
Margaret Chen.
And Ethan answering with a fury I had never heard before.
“You knew she was carrying my child!”
Then everything went black.
…
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