“You have got to be kidding me,” he continues, his tone hardening as he steps closer, towering over my broken form. “Nine months without a single word. Not a phone call. Not a letter. And now you miraculously appear in my hospital? On my floor?”
His dark eyes drop significantly to my trembling belly. The monitors beep faster, betraying my rising panic.
A shadow flickers across his handsome face. Suspicion. Contempt. And underneath it all, a fragile, vibrating shock.
He smiles. It is a terrifying, humorless expression.
“So that was it,” he murmurs, loud enough only for me and the closest nurses to hear. “That is why you vanished so easily into the night.”
I stare back at him through a haze of blinding pain, my pride warring with my agony. “I didn’t vanish,” I whisper, my voice shaking with a rage I thought I had buried. “You threw me out.”
His jaw tightens so hard I can hear his teeth grind.
“Doctor,” María interrupts, her voice slicing through the heavy tension. “The baby’s heart rate is dropping into the 90s. We are losing them.”
He ignores her. He leans down, his face inches from mine, his eyes burning with a dark, accusatory fire.
“Who is the father, Cecilia?”
The question drops into the sterile room like a live grenade.
One nurse freezes halfway through hanging a fresh IV bag. Another abruptly looks down at her shoes. María’s face tightens with professional outrage, but in the empire of St. Raphael Medical Center, nobody questions Dr. Herrera.
I feel another contraction rising, a deep, pulling tidal wave from the ocean floor of my body, but the fiery anger in my chest rises faster.
“You don’t get to ask me that,” I hiss, gripping the metal bedrails.
His eyes narrow to dangerous slits. “In my hospital, in my delivery room, when I am the attending physician responsible for keeping you alive, I get to ask anything I damn well please.”
“No,” I say, panting as the pain crests. “You get to do your job. For once in your life, put the ego away and do your job.”
For the first time since he walked in, his supreme confidence falters. He blinks, caught off guard. Because I am not begging him.
Nine months ago, I had begged. I had fallen to my knees on the hardwood floor of our foyer. I had begged him to look at the financial documents I had uncovered. I had begged him not to believe the glossy, damning photographs his mother, Isabel Herrera, had gleefully thrown across our mahogany dining table like a royal flush.
They were photos of me standing closely outside a downtown hotel with a man named Andrés Velasco.
I remembered the exact, miserable evening those photos were taken. I had gone to that hotel lobby in the pouring rain to meet Nicolás’s private attorney. I had gone because, while organizing the charity gala files, I had found a staggering web of lies. Fake hospital expenses. Inflated surgical charges billed to dying patients. Millions of dollars routed directly through a ghost company registered under Isabel’s maiden name.
I had tried to save him from the fallout. I had tried to protect the man I loved.
Instead, Nicolás had looked at those photos, looked at his weeping, theatrical mother, and accused me of whoring myself out. Isabel, elegant and dripping in pearls, had stood behind his shoulder, her eyes shining with fake tears and a very real, poisonous triumph.
“She is a parasite, Nicolás,” his mother had whispered. “Women from her background always are. They find a host, and they drain it.”
I had stood there, trembling, my hand resting instinctively on my still-flat stomach. I had told him I was late. I had told him we needed to talk about the future.
And Nicolás Herrera had laughed.
It was a hollow, cruel sound that I still heard in my darkest nightmares. “Do not try to trap me with a bastard child to save your meal ticket,” he had sneered.
Then he opened the heavy oak front door to the freezing rain.
I walked out with one suitcase, twenty dollars in my pocket, and a heart so thoroughly shattered I truly believed nothing beautiful could ever grow inside me again. But something did. A tiny, stubborn heartbeat. A reason to endure the drafty rented room, the cheap instant ramen, the humiliating pity of clinic receptionists who saw a woman alone.
Now, that child is suffocating inside me. And Nicolás is standing over me, staring at my belly as if the ghosts of his past have finally kicked down the door.
“Doctor!” María practically shouts, abandoning protocol. “We need a decision now! Fetal bradycardia is sustained!”
The sharp medical term snaps Nicolás back to reality. He is no longer the betrayed ex-husband; he is the surgeon. He snatches the chart back from the foot of the bed. His eyes dart over the vitals, calculating the grim mathematics of life and death.
The arrogance completely thins out, replaced by a cold, terrifying urgency.
“This is an abruption,” he mutters, his voice tight. “She’s bleeding internally.”
María steps up. “No prenatal records in the system. She was a walk-in.”
I force my eyes open, staring at the blurry ceiling tiles. “I had prenatal care. Just… not in a palace like this.”
Nicolás looks down at me, a complicated storm brewing in his dark eyes. I cannot tell if he pities me or hates me for surviving without him.
But before he can speak, the primary monitor emits a long, shrill, continuous tone.
The baby’s heartbeat crashes.
