I saw the tremor in his fingers.
I saw the terror in his eyes.
And somehow that terrified me more than the screaming monitor.

“Baby’s decelerating fast,” Linda warned.

The sound coming from the machine no longer resembled a heartbeat.
It sounded like panic.

My panic.

“Chloe, listen to me.” Ethan stepped beside the bed, voice low and firm. “I need you to breathe slowly. Can you do that for me?”

I wanted to tell him no.
Wanted to scream that he had forfeited the right to ask me for anything the day he let his mother dismantle our marriage piece by piece while he stood there silent.

But another contraction hit.

White-hot agony tore through my body.

I gasped.

Ethan grabbed my hand before I realized what was happening.

And suddenly I was back seven years earlier.

Twenty-three years old.
Snow falling outside our first apartment.
His fingers laced through mine while we ate takeout noodles on the floor because we couldn’t afford furniture yet.

“You and me,” he had whispered then. “Always.”

The memory hurt worse than labor.

“The cord may be compressed,” Ethan said sharply to the staff. “Prep OR two just in case.”

My stomach dropped.

“No.” I shook my head violently. “No surgery. Please.”

“Chloe—”

“I can do this.”

He looked at me for one long second.

Not as a doctor.
Not as my ex-husband.

As the man who once knew every fear I had.