“I’m your fiancée,” she whispered. “I’m not leaving this room because another woman cried over you.”
My chest hurt.
Not the surgical pain.
The other kind.
The kind no doctor could chart.
“She saved my life,” I said.
“I know.”
“She was there in the OR.”
“I know that too.”
“She—”
Georgia’s face tightened, but she did not look away.
“She what?”
I could not say it.
She told me she loved me.
She kissed my hand.
She begged me not to die.
She was the voice I followed back.
Those were not words a man said to his fiancée while wearing her ring around his future.
So I chose cowardice again and dressed it as kindness.
“She did her job,” I said.
Georgia flinched.
Because she knew.
Because I knew.
Because that was the cruelest almost-truth in the room.
“Yes,” Georgia said quietly. “She did.”
The silence afterward was full of machines.
I looked at the ring on her finger.
The diamond was small compared to the kind of rocks men with more money and less conscience bought, but it was beautiful. I had picked it because it looked like Georgia. Bright without screaming. Warm. Classic. Easy to imagine on a hand wrapped around coffee mugs and paint samples and someday a baby blanket if that was the life we built.
A life.
Not a dream.
