My Fiancé Killed Our Babies for His Mistress

I brought coffee. Two cups, both black, because the night nurse liked hers black and I didn't know what else to bring a woman who'd been sitting with my mother while I slept.

The elevator doors opened on the ICU floor at 6:02 a.m. and the first thing I noticed was the quiet. Not hospital quiet. Wrong quiet. No beeping. No hiss of the ventilator cycling air in, air out, the sound I'd fallen asleep to for three weeks straight.

I walked faster. The cups sweated in my hands.

Leighton was in the hallway outside Room 412. Her eyes were red-rimmed, mascara tracked in two clean lines down her cheeks, and for one stupid second I thought, *she's hurt, something happened to her.* Then I saw the room behind her. The monitor dark. The machine silent. My mother's chest not moving.

The cups hit the floor before I decided to drop them.

"Mazie." Leighton reached for my arm. "I just came to see her, I swear, I found her like this, I called for help, I—"

I didn't hear the rest. I was already inside, already at the bed, already holding my mother's hand and finding it cool in a way hands aren't supposed to be cool, not with blood still somewhere underneath the skin.

"Mom." I said it like she might answer if I said it right. "Mom."

A nurse came running. Then a second one. Someone said words like *time of death* and *notify the attending* and none of it landed anywhere real. I stood there with my mother's hand in mine and I understood, in the flat, total way you understand a fact you've already known for a while without letting yourself know it, that Leighton had not *found* her like this.

I turned around. Leighton was in the doorway, dabbing under her eye with one knuckle, careful not to smear.

The supply cart was three feet away. I don't remember deciding. I remember the blade in my hand, small and silver and lighter than I expected, and I remember the distance between me and her throat closing fast.

I didn't reach it.

Tristan's hand closed around my wrist mid-swing, twisting until the blade dropped and clattered somewhere near the baseboard. He didn't look at me. He was already turning, already stepping in front of Leighton like I was the weather he needed to shield her from.

"She killed her," I said. My voice didn't even sound like screaming. It sounded almost calm, which scared me more than the rage did. "She killed my mother, Tristan, look at her, she's not even crying right, nobody cries that clean—"

"Stop." One word. He still hadn't looked at me.

Leighton folded into him like she'd practiced the fall a hundred times. Her voice came out broken and small. "She's not wrong to hate me. I know how it looks. I know." A shuddering breath. "But I would never— Tristan, you know I've wanted this more than anything, you know what the doctors told me, that I'll never carry a baby of my own, and she—" a glance at me, wet-eyed, apologetic in a way that made my skin crawl, "—she's thrown away ten. Ten, Tristan. I would give anything for one."

I laughed. It came out wrong, cracked in the middle. "You planned every single one of those ten. You told me yourself. A bet. A number. Capri."

Nobody answered that. Not Leighton, who kept her face pressed to his chest like she hadn't heard a word. Not Tristan, whose jaw had gone tight the way it always did right before he stopped being a man who could be reasoned with.

He turned his head, finally, to Dr. Feld, who'd appeared in the hallway with his glasses pushed up into his hair like this was simply the next appointment on a long morning.

"Prep her," Tristan said. "Full hysterectomy. Leighton's the recipient — coordinate with her surgeon."

I didn't scream. I want to say I fought, that I made it hard, that I gave them something to remember. I didn't. My mother was still warm two rooms behind me and cooling by the minute, and some part of me had already left the building.

They walked me down the same corridor where I'd once stood with a binder of invitation samples, arguing with a wedding planner about gold foil versus silver. The lighting hadn't changed. The art on the walls hadn't changed. I had.

On the gurney, the IV already sliding something cold and heavy into my vein, I found Tristan's eyes one last time.

I didn't say anything. I didn't have anything left to say that he hadn't already decided not to hear.

But something in that silence reached him anyway — I watched it land, watched his throat move, watched his hand twitch like it wanted to stop what his mouth had already ordered. Too late. It had always, always been too late with him, just on a different clock than the rest of the world.

Dr. Feld's gloved hands appeared at the edge of my vision. "Count backward from ten for me, Mazie."

Ten. Of course it was ten.

The ceiling tile above me had a water stain shaped like a fist.

"Ten," I said, and the room started sliding sideways, soft and slow, like the whole world had finally stopped pretending to hold still.