I read it twice.
The room seemed to narrow.
“Emily?” Dad asked.
I handed him the paper.
His eyes moved across the lines. When he reached the signature, his expression hardened in a different way. Not the frozen anger from the apartment. This was focus. The colonel part of him had stepped forward.
“Who is Claire?”
“I don’t know.”
“Ryan never mentioned her?”
“No.”
Dad studied the ultrasound. “This says Baby Carter.”
My stomach turned cold. “Ryan told me he’d never been engaged before me.”
Dad folded the letter carefully. “Then we find Claire.”
For two days, the hospital became a strange island between my old life and the one waiting beyond the doors. Nurses came and went. Doctors checked the baby. Priya helped me make a safety plan, a phrase that sounded too practical for something that felt like rebuilding my soul.
Ryan was not allowed to visit.
