“Who is the father, Cecilia?”
The question drops into the sterile room like a live grenade.
One nurse freezes halfway through hanging a fresh IV bag. Another abruptly looks down at her shoes. María’s face tightens with professional outrage, but in the empire of St. Raphael Medical Center, nobody questions Dr. Herrera.
I feel another contraction rising, a deep, pulling tidal wave from the ocean floor of my body, but the fiery anger in my chest rises faster.
“You don’t get to ask me that,” I hiss, gripping the metal bedrails.
His eyes narrow to dangerous slits. “In my hospital, in my delivery room, when I am the attending physician responsible for keeping you alive, I get to ask anything I damn well please.”
“No,” I say, panting as the pain crests. “You get to do your job. For once in your life, put the ego away and do your job.”
For the first time since he walked in, his supreme confidence falters. He blinks, caught off guard. Because I am not begging him.
Nine months ago, I had begged. I had fallen to my knees on the hardwood floor of our foyer. I had begged him to look at the financial documents I had uncovered. I had begged him not to believe the glossy, damning photographs his mother, Isabel Herrera, had gleefully thrown across our mahogany dining table like a royal flush.
They were photos of me standing closely outside a downtown hotel with a man named Andrés Velasco.
I remembered the exact, miserable evening those photos were taken. I had gone to that hotel lobby in the pouring rain to meet Nicolás’s private attorney. I had gone because, while organizing the charity gala files, I had found a staggering web of lies. Fake hospital expenses. Inflated surgical charges billed to dying patients. Millions of dollars routed directly through a ghost company registered under Isabel’s maiden name.
I had tried to save him from the fallout. I had tried to protect the man I loved.
Instead, Nicolás had looked at those photos, looked at his weeping, theatrical mother, and accused me of whoring myself out. Isabel, elegant and dripping in pearls, had stood behind his shoulder, her eyes shining with fake tears and a very real, poisonous triumph.
“She is a parasite, Nicolás,” his mother had whispered. “Women from her background always are. They find a host, and they drain it.”
I had stood there, trembling, my hand resting instinctively on my still-flat stomach. I had told him I was late. I had told him we needed to talk about the future.
And Nicolás Herrera had laughed.
It was a hollow, cruel sound that I still heard in my darkest nightmares. “Do not try to trap me with a bastard child to save your meal ticket,” he had sneered.
Then he opened the heavy oak front door to the freezing rain.
I walked out with one suitcase, twenty dollars in my pocket, and a heart so thoroughly shattered I truly believed nothing beautiful could ever grow inside me again. But something did. A tiny, stubborn heartbeat. A reason to endure the drafty rented room, the cheap instant ramen, the humiliating pity of clinic receptionists who saw a woman alone.
Now, that child is suffocating inside me. And Nicolás is standing over me, staring at my belly as if the ghosts of his past have finally kicked down the door.
“Doctor!” María practically shouts, abandoning protocol. “We need a decision now! Fetal bradycardia is sustained!”
The sharp medical term snaps Nicolás back to reality. He is no longer the betrayed ex-husband; he is the surgeon. He snatches the chart back from the foot of the bed. His eyes dart over the vitals, calculating the grim mathematics of life and death.
The arrogance completely thins out, replaced by a cold, terrifying urgency.
“This is an abruption,” he mutters, his voice tight. “She’s bleeding internally.”
María steps up. “No prenatal records in the system. She was a walk-in.”
I force my eyes open, staring at the blurry ceiling tiles. “I had prenatal care. Just… not in a palace like this.”
Nicolás looks down at me, a complicated storm brewing in his dark eyes. I cannot tell if he pities me or hates me for surviving without him.
But before he can speak, the primary monitor emits a long, shrill, continuous tone.
The baby’s heartbeat crashes.
Nicolás explodes into motion. “Crash C-section! Prepare OR Two! Call anesthesia, get four units of O-negative blood on a rapid infuser! Move her, NOW!”
The room erupts into organized chaos. Brakes are unlocked. Nurses yell overlapping codes. The ceiling lights become a streaking blur as my bed is shoved violently out of the room and down the long, white hallway. Nicolás jogs beside the bed, his hand gripping the metal rail near my head, barking orders into a radio.
As we crash through the double doors of the surgical wing, I reach out with a weak, trembling hand and blindly grab his wrist. His skin is warm.
He looks down at me.
“Please,” I sob, the last of my tough exterior dissolving into a mother’s absolute terror. “Nicolás. Don’t let her die. Just save my baby.”
He stares at me, and for the very first time in our entire history together, I see past the pride, past the anger, past the monolithic ego.
I see pure, unadulterated panic.
“I won’t,” he whispers fiercely, squeezing my fingers. “I swear to God, Cecilia, I won’t let you go.”
But as the heavy OR doors slam shut behind us, a fresh wave of agony rips through my spine, and the metallic taste of blood floods my mouth. I realize, with sudden, terrifying clarity, that the darkness pulling me under is not just exhaustion. It is the end.
Inside Operating Room Two, the world dissolves into a blinding, sterile white and the sharp clatter of surgical steel.
Someone forces a plastic mask over my nose and mouth. The air smells heavily of chemicals and sweet, artificial oxygen. A voice tells me to breathe deep, that I am going under, that they have to work fast to cut the baby out.
Through the dizzying fog of the anesthesia, I search wildly for Nicolás.
He stands directly under the intense halo of the surgical lights, scrubbing in with frantic speed. A nurse ties a sterile gown around his broad back. He snaps his gloves on, his jaw set so tight the muscles twitch. He does not look like the untouchable king of St. Raphael right now. He looks like a man standing on the edge of a crumbling cliff.
“Cecilia,” he says.
His voice cuts through the beeping machinery. It sounds utterly different. Stripped bare.
I roll my heavy head toward him. His dark eyes meet mine over the blue surgical mask.
“I need you to fight,” he commands. “Stay with me.”
I want to laugh, but it comes out as a wet cough. I want to remind him that I spent three years fighting for him, fighting for us, until he locked me out in the cold. I want to tell him that I am so tired of fighting.
But then a monitor blares a warning. My blood pressure is tanking.
