I couldn’t find my voice. I simply handed him the phone. I watched his face as he read it. His expression didn’t shift into pity, but I saw his jaw tighten until the bone was visible. He handed it back, his silence more powerful than any curse.
“Can you postpone?” he asked.
“Dr. Herrera said the growth rate is too high. I can’t wait.”
“Then you go in,” Mark said, his voice like iron. “You go in, you wake up, and you realize that the trash has finally taken itself out.”
At 7:45 AM, the orderly arrived with a gurney. I was sitting on the edge of the bed, my eyes raw, the bitterness in my mouth tasting like copper. I looked at Mark, who was also being prepared for a minor procedure. He looked so decent, so rooted.
A wild, jagged laugh escaped my throat. “You’re so decent,” I said, the irony stinging. “Not like him. If I survive this, Mark Grant, maybe we should just get married and call it a day.”
It was a bitter joke, a defense mechanism meant to elicit a polite smile or a “just focus on getting well.”
Mark stopped. He looked at me for a long, unblinking moment. He didn’t smile. He didn’t joke.
“Okay,” he said.
“Seriously?” I stammered.
“Okay,” he repeated, a simple, solemn vow.
Cliffhanger: Before I could ask if he was insane, the gurney began to roll. The double doors of the surgical wing swallowed me, and the last thing I saw was Mark Grant nodding to me as if we had just signed a contract in blood.
Chapter 5: The Smell of Chicken Broth
The darkness came like the snow—soft, muffled, and absolute.
I woke to a dull, deep ache in my abdomen, the sensation of my own body being unfamiliar to me. I opened my eyes to see the river-shaped crack in the ceiling. I was alive. The simple immensity of that thought made me want to weep. Inhale. Exhale. It was a good pain. The pain of the living.
Brenda Sanchez appeared, her face a mask of genuine relief. “You’re back, Jessica. Dr. Herrera was flawless. Everything was removed. And,” she paused, her voice dropping to a whisper, “your reproductive organs were preserved. You can still have children, honey.”
I closed my eyes, a warm wave of relief washing from my chest to my toes.
