Chapter Two: The Graveyard of Us
The first sensation that breached the heavy, narcotic darkness was the frantic, desperate sound of crying.
Not my own. A baby’s cry. Thin, reedy, and furious.
My eyes flew open, assaulted by the dim, sterile lights of the intensive-care recovery room. A jagged, blinding tear of pain ripped across my abdomen, so violent that a ragged gasp caught in my throat. My hand instantly flew to my stomach. It was empty.
“Easy. Do not move.”
The voice felt like a physical blow to my chest.
I turned my head. Ethan Caldwell was sitting in a vinyl chair beside my bed. He was no longer wearing his sterile gown, but he was still in blue surgical scrubs. Deep, bruised shadows of exhaustion were carved beneath his eyes, and near the cuff of his left sleeve, I saw a faint, rusted smear of dried blood.
My blood.
For a long, suffocating minute, neither of us spoke. Five years stood between us like an open grave.
Finally, I forced the words past my cracked lips. “Where are my babies?”
“They are alive,” Ethan replied, his voice completely devoid of emotion.
I squeezed my eyes shut, a jagged, ugly sob tearing free from my chest. Alive.
“Your son is currently on aggressive respiratory support,” Ethan continued, his tone purely clinical. “Your daughter required extensive resuscitation, but she is stabilizing. They are both in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. The team is cautiously optimistic.”
“Thank you,” I whispered to the ceiling, the words tasting like ash. Of all the trauma surgeons in this massive city, fate had orchestrated this cruel reunion.
Ethan leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees. “I need to ask you some medically necessary questions, Hannah.”
A bitter, humorless laugh escaped me. “Go ahead, Dr. Caldwell.”
“You came in severely malnourished, suffering from a catastrophic abruption,” he stated, his gray eyes locking onto mine, stripping away all my defenses. “And my nurses documented extensive, fading contusions on your ribs and arms. Where is the twins’ father?”
My fingers dug into the thin hospital blanket. “He is dead. His name was Marcus Vale. He died in a prison fight three weeks ago.”
Ethan’s jaw clenched so hard I thought I heard his teeth grind. He understood exactly where the bruises came from. But he didn’t offer pity. Instead, the clinical detachment in his eyes fractured, replaced by a raw, bleeding vulnerability that terrified me.
“There is something else,” Ethan whispered, the silence in the room suddenly feeling heavy enough to crush my lungs. “When we separated five years ago… were you pregnant?”
The cardiac monitor beside my bed instantly spiked, betraying my panic.
Beep. Beep. Beep.
My entire body went rigid. I stared at him, my breathing turning shallow. “You have absolutely no right to ask me that.”
“Hannah.” His voice cracked, exposing the twenty-nine-year-old boy I used to love. “Were you?”
For five agonizing years, I had rehearsed this exact confrontation in my mind. In some fantasies, I screamed until my throat bled. In others, I slapped him across the face. But lying here, hollowed out and stitched back together, I was simply too exhausted to carry the lie anymore.
“Yes,” I whispered.
Ethan stopped breathing. The color violently drained from his face, leaving him looking like a corpse.
“I found out three days after you threw me out of your mother’s house,” I continued, the tears finally spilling hot and fast down my cheeks. “I called your cell phone seventeen times. I left voicemails begging you to listen to me.”
“I never received a single call from you,” Ethan choked out, gripping the arms of his chair.
“Of course you didn’t,” I sneered, the venom finally rising. “Your mother took your phone. Just like she took everything else.”
Ethan stood up so abruptly that his chair scraped harshly against the linoleum. He pressed his hands to his temples, his chest heaving. “What happened to the baby, Hannah?”
The sterile walls of the hospital room seemed to dissolve. Suddenly, I wasn’t twenty-nine anymore. I was twenty-four. Alone, terrified, and strapped to a bed in a private, elite maternity clinic owned by Caldwell Medical Group.
I looked Ethan dead in the eyes and delivered the sentence that would burn his entire empire to the ground.
“Your mother’s doctors told me my son died.”
