The card still hung from the ribbon.
Thinking of you.
—Mark’s Office Team
Not Mark.
His office.
For the first time, something cold crept beneath his ribs.
He pulled out his phone. The screen reflected his face before lighting up.
Twenty-six missed calls.
Fourteen voicemails.
Nine text messages from the hospital.
Three from his mother.
One from an unknown number.
And none from Emily after the surgery.
His thumb hovered over her contact.
Emily Carter.
A photo filled the screen—the two of them in Maine two summers earlier, her hair whipped across her face by the wind, her laugh bright and unguarded. Back then, before the pregnancy had frightened her and irritated him in equal measure. Before the doctor visits became “too many.” Before she stopped asking him to come because she had grown tired of hearing him sigh.
He pressed call.
It rang once.
Twice.
Then went to voicemail.
Her recorded voice floated into his ear, soft and familiar.
Hi, you’ve reached Emily. Leave a message and I’ll call you back when I can.
He hung up before the beep.
He called again.
Voicemail.
Again.
Voicemail.
His stomach twisted.
A woman at the nurses’ station watched him with recognition in her eyes. She was older than the first nurse, with silver threading through her dark hair and a badge that read Charge Nurse Lauren.
Mark remembered her vaguely.
She had been in the room when Emily was bleeding.
She had called him.
His mouth went dry.
“You,” he said.
Lauren looked at him without surprise.
“Mr. Carter.”
“Where is my wife?”
Lauren held his gaze. “She asked that no personal information be released to you beyond what hospital policy requires.”
Mark blinked. “What?”
“She amended her contact permissions before discharge.”
“That’s impossible.”
“It isn’t.”
“She was barely conscious.”
“She was conscious when she signed the paperwork.”
Something about the word signed made his face burn.
Paperwork.
Emily signing alone.
The consent form.
The phone calls.
The dark screen in his jacket pocket while Madison leaned close and whispered, Today is about us.
Mark turned away, pressing his hand against the wall. For a moment, he thought he might be sick.
“I need to see my children,” he said.
Lauren’s eyes softened, though her voice remained firm. “You need to speak with NICU administration.”
“They’re my children.”
“Yes,” she said. “And they are patients. There are protocols.”
“Are they alive?”
The question broke out of him before he could stop it.
The hallway quieted inside his mind.
Lauren did not answer immediately, and in that pause Mark heard the memory of fetal monitors screaming.
Finally, she said, “You need to speak with Dr. Patel.”
Mark stared at her.
The refusal told him nothing.
And somehow it told him everything.
Dr. Naomi Patel met him twenty minutes later in a small consultation room with pale walls and two boxes of tissues on the table.
