My Husband Asked For A Hall Pass On My Delivery Date Chapter 04
Hour Sixteen
The bowl nearly slipped out of my hands.
I grabbed the bed rail and tried to stand, but the incision slammed me back like a wall. My spine hit the headboard hard.
I couldn’t get up.
But my baby was in that room, fighting to stay alive.
I couldn’t just lie here and wait.
“Please.” I seized the nurse’s arm. My nails dug into her skin. “Take me to him. Just let me see him. One look.”
She stared at my face, gray and drained, and the desperation pouring out of my eyes.
She sighed. Pulled a thick jacket from the closet, draped it over my shoulders, then brought a wheelchair and helped me into it.
The wheels rolled down the silent hallway. Each rotation ground into my chest like a millstone.
Through the glass of the NICU, my baby lay still inside the incubator.
He was so small. His face was no bigger than my palm. Tubes I couldn’t name threaded in and out of his body.
He looked like porcelain. One touch and he’d shatter.
The numbers on the monitor flickered without mercy. His chest rose and fell with the ventilator’s rhythm, barely.
I pressed my palm flat against the cold glass, as if I could push my warmth through to him.
Separated by that hard, cold barrier, I whispered his name in a voice only I could hear.
“Andy.”
A nickname I’d picked when I was seven months along.
I didn’t ask for wealth. I didn’t ask for greatness. I just wanted him to be safe.
He didn’t open his eyes. But his fingers seemed to twitch, just once, in time with the beeping of the machines.
I pressed my forehead against the glass. Tears slid down without a sound, blurring everything.
My phone buzzed in my pocket. My heart lurched. I thought it was Ethan.
It wasn’t a call. It wasn’t a message.
Sienna had posted again.
This time, a video.
Sea breeze lifting her loose curls. She was laughing, bright and carefree, rising on tiptoe to loop a scarf around Ethan’s neck.
Ethan had his back to the camera. I couldn’t see his expression. But I could see him bend down and tie her shoelace, gently, like it was the most natural thing in the world.
Her voice floated through the clip, teasing: “Ethan, after the forty-eight hours are up, are you really going back?”
His voice came through broken by the wind, but every word reached me clearly. “I promised her I would.”
Sienna’s laugh drifted. “But you also promised me you’d help me find our teenage years again.”
Ethan didn’t answer. He just turned around and pulled her into his arms.
The comments underneath were all cheerful.
[Adults deserve a little childish romance too! Go Ethan!]
[soooooo jealous of Sienna. imagine being LOVED like that by Ethan Hale.]
I looked at my baby in the incubator, clinging to life by a thread. My fingers dug into the wheelchair armrests until my knuckles went white.
Their recklessness was about each other.
The part they threw away was everything I had.
Twelve hours after Ethan left, the fever hit. My temperature climbed to 103°F.
The incision was infected. The bleeding wouldn’t stop. The nurse rushed to get the doctor.
The doctor examined me, then looked up, her face tight. “Where is your family? Is there anyone who can stay with you?”
I shook my head.
The look she gave me shifted. Pity and something sharper underneath. “This isn’t safe. You just had major surgery. You can’t be alone.”
I wanted to say that I’m not supposed to be alone.
But the person who was supposed to be here was busy playing the devoted boy in another woman’s feed.
I just had to survive forty-eight hours. Then he’d wake up from the dream called Sienna, and come back to reality.
But that really looked like a joke. Or a set of boring soap operas.
…
Four more hours passed. Hour sixteen.
The nurse burst through the door again. This time her face was white.
“The baby’s condition is getting worse. They’re trying to rescue him now.”