The hospital smelled like bleach and quiet grief. That sterile, aching kind of clean that tried and failed to scrub away sorrow.
Jade opened her eyes slowly.
The light overhead was too bright. Too white.
It buzzed faintly, sterile and sharp, casting shadows that didn't belong. Her throat was dry as sandpaper. Her lips were cracked. Her body felt like it had been hollowed out.
A steady beep pulsed beside her. The rhythm of a machine, not a heartbeat. An IV line tugged gently at the soft skin of her arm.
But she didn't need a nurse to tell her what had happened.
She already knew.
She felt it.
A chasm had opened inside her, vast, silent, and irrevocably empty.
Her hands, trembling, moved down to her stomach.
Flat.
Too flat.
Her baby was gone.
Her breath caught, shallow and sharp. For a moment, she couldn't breathe at all. The silence screamed louder than any alarm.
Then came a soft knock. The door eased open with the weight of practiced sorrow.
A nurse stepped in, her expression gentle, her movements careful, the way people move when they're carrying bad news in their palms.
"Mrs. Blaine," she said softly, "I'm so sorry for your loss."
Jade stared at her.
She didn't speak. Didn't blink. Her eyes felt dry and wide and far too open.
The nurse approached and draped a warm blanket over her shoulders, as if warmth could fix what was broken. As if it could touch the pain buried deep in her bones.
"We did everything we could," the nurse murmured. "You lost a lot of blood. But you're going to recover."
Recover.
The word landed with a dull thud in her chest.
Recover.
How does a mother recover from the absence of something she never got to hold? How does she mend from the loss of a heartbeat she memorized, a future she imagined, a child she never got to meet?
The nurse said something else, but Jade didn't hear it. Her ears buzzed like she was underwater.
And then she was alone again.
The silence returned.
And this time, she let it swallow her.
She turned her face into the pillow and broke apart in pieces. No sobs. Not at first. Just a slow unraveling. Then the pain took shape, raw and violent and unrelenting.
She wept into the sheets, hot, ugly sobs that shook her entire body. Grief poured from her in waves, muffled only by the fabric that smelled of detergent and sorrow.
No flowers.
No visitors.
No Cole.
She turned her head toward the bedside table. Her phone sat there, dark screen cracked slightly in the corner. One percent battery.
No messages.
No missed calls.
Nothing.
He never called.
Not during the ambulance ride.
Not during surgery.
Not during the longest night of her life.
He had left, for Vivien.
And never looked back.
The pain that surged in her chest now was different. Not the pain of loss, but of betrayal.
A colder kind of ache. One that sat beside the grief like a shadow.
The next morning, the doctor came in. Young. Kind eyes. He carried a clipboard and that awful kind of sympathy doctors learn in med school.
Jade's hands barely worked. They trembled as she signed whatever needed signing.
"She was twenty-four weeks," he said gently. "Still early... but far enough to grieve."
Far enough to grieve.
What a cruel measurement.
As if her grief needed permission.
She nodded slowly, but the words floated past her, untethered.
She had already memorized the galloping sound of the baby's heartbeat from her first ultrasound.
She had already picked names in secret, whispering them to the quiet night.
She had already begun carving out space in her life, her body, her soul—for this child.
And now?
Now there was nothing.
Just a cold hospital room. A silence that rang louder than sirens. A flimsy hospital bracelet.
A monitor that no longer beeped for two.
And a name on her contact list that remained gray and silent.
Cole Blaine.
Her husband.
The man who wasn't there for their baby's beginning.
The man who wasn't there for their baby's end.