"She said you were in surgery. A trauma case that had come in that morning." Cathy met my eyes, and I saw my own grief reflected there. "She said you were saving someone's life and she couldn't ask you to leave for something that was already over."
I remembered that day. A six-hour surgery on a patient with multiple gunshot wounds, touch and go the entire time. I'd come home exhausted and found Calla already in bed, her back to me, with the lights off.
She'd been recovering from losing our child. And I'd crawled into bed beside her and fallen asleep without saying a word.
"She was alone?" My voice cracked. "The whole time?"
"I sat with her during the procedure and held her hand when she woke up from the anesthesia." Cathy's tears broke free and flowed down her weathered cheeks. "She thanked me. Can you imagine? She'd just lost her baby, and she thanked me for being there. And then she asked when she could go back to work."
I flinched, the ringing in my ears so overwhelming I had to repeat the words. "Back to work?"
Cathy nodded. "That same afternoon. I tried to convince her to go home, to rest, to call someone who could be with her. But she said she had patients who needed her." Her hands trembled. "She walked out of here three hours after the procedure and went back to the OR. I've been a nurse for thirty years, Dr. Reed. I've seen a lot of women go through loss. But I've never seen anyone carry it the way she did. So quiet. So alone. Like she'd decided she didn't deserve to have anyone hold her while she's breaking down."
I couldn't see anything anymore. My vision blurred, swimming with tears I couldn't stop.
"I should have known," I whispered. "I should have seen that something was wrong."
"She didn't want you to see. She made sure of that." Cathy reached across and took my hand, her grip warm and steady. "She signed all the paperwork herself and listed herself as her own emergency contact. She asked us specifically not to notify anyone."
"Why? Why would she do that?"
"I asked her the same thing." Cathy squeezed my hand. "She said your marriage was already dying. Said she didn't want to trap you with guilt and didn't want a baby to be the reason you stayed with someone you didn't want to be with anymore."
"I never stopped wanting to be with her." The words tore out of me with desperation. "She was everything to me. She'salwaysbeen everything to me."
"Then tell her that." Cathy released my hand and stood. "She's been carrying this alone for five years. That's long enough."
I sat in that break room for a long time after Cathy left.
The afternoon light shifted across the walls, and I watched it without seeing, my mind replaying every moment of those final months of our marriage. Every fight. Every silence. Every night I'd lay beside her in the dark, wondering why she felt so far away.
She'd been grieving alone. While I'd been too wrapped up in my own frustration to notice.
I pulled out my phone and stared at the screen. Calla's name was right there in my contacts, one tap away. I could call her, demand answers, and rage for keeping this from me—for making decisions about our family without me, for carrying a burden that should have been ours to share.
But the anger wouldn't come.
All I felt was grief. For the baby we'd never know. For the wife who'd suffered alone. For all the years we'd wasted, both of us too stubborn and too scared to fight for what we had.
I drove back to Obsidian as the sun was setting.
The hospital was quieter when I arrived, the daytime chaos giving way to the steadier rhythm of the evening shift. I found Calla in the physician's lounge on the fourth floor, sitting by the window with a cup of coffee, staring out at the city lights coming on below.
"Calla."
She turned at the sound of my voice.
"Cassian? What's wrong?"
"We need to talk."
I didn't lead her anywhere. I didn't care about privacy anymore or who saw or what they thought. The investigation was still ongoing, and none of that mattered.
None of it had ever mattered.
"The ethics investigation… They pulled your medical records from Metropolitan. From five years ago."
Calla went pale.
