Two Can Play (Celeste and Dominic) novel Chapter 321

Chapter 321

The doctor appeared after forty-three minutes. I knew it was forty-three because I had been counting the seconds, and when I saw the particular set of his mouth, I knew what he was going to say before he opened it.

“Mrs. Fisher?” He had kind eyes and the exhausted posture of someone who had been delivering bad news for hours. “I am so sorry. We did everything we could, but the placental abruption was too severe. We were unable to save the baby.”

I nodded and thanked him, my voice calm and steady and utterly detached from the thing cracking open inside my chest, and then I walked to the waiting room and sat in a plastic chair and stared at the wall. A niece. A nephew A tiny human who had done nothing wrong and would never get to open its eyes, never get to cry, never get to wrap its small hand around my finger while Sierra looked on with exhausted joy. Gone because Felix had decided his obsession with a woman who sucked strangers’ cocks for money was more important than the family he already

had.

I broke down. Not gracefully, not in the controlled manner of a woman who had spent years perfecting the art of composure. I sobbed, my shoulders heaving, tears hot and relentless and utterly indifferent to the fact that I was in a public waiting room where anyone could see. I cried for the baby who would never exist. I cried for Sierra, who had done nothing wrong except love the wrong man. I cried for my mother, who did not yet know she had lost a grandchild. And somewhere beneath all of that, I cried for myself, for the time wasted on Julian, for the brother I had lost to Seraphine’s machinations.

“That is her.”

I looked up. Felix stood at the nurses’ station, his chest heaving, his face pale, his eyes darting around with desperate urgency. The nurse pointed toward Sierra’s room, and Felix took off at a sprint, his shoes squeaking against linoleum as he disappeared through the doorway.

I sat in the waiting room another ten minutes, collecting myself, pulling the pieces of my composure back together with practiced efficiency. Then I stood, smoothed down my blood-stained skirt because there was nothing else to do with it, and walked toward Sierra’s room.

The door was slightly ajar. I pushed it open and stopped at the threshold.

Sierra was in the hospital bed, her face turned toward the window, tears streaming silently down her cheeks and pooling in the hollow of her throat. The monitors beside her beeped their steady, indifferent rhythm. She looked small in the bed, smaller than she had looked in the lobby, as though the loss of the baby had physically diminished her.

On the floor beside her bed, on his knees, holding her hand in both of his, was Felix.

“Sierra, please.” His voice cracked on her name, splintered into pieces. “Please forgive me. I did not mean it. 1 swear to God, I did not mean to push you. I was not thinking. I was not myself. Please, Sierra, please.”

Sierra did not look at him. She stared at the window, her face blank, her tears falling in a steady, silent stream.

“I will make it up to you.” Felix pressed her hand to his forehead, his shoulders shaking with sobs, and I realized with distant, clinical detachment that he was crying. Real tears, the kind that left tracks through the grime on his face. “We will get married, Sierra. As soon as you leave this hospital. We will have a proper wedding, whatever you want, wherever you want. And we will try again. We will make another baby. I will love you, and I will love our baby, and I will spend the rest of my life making sure you never doubt that.”

Sierra turned her head. Very slowly, as though the movement cost her more energy than she had to spare. She looked at Felix, at his tear-streaked face, at his pleading eyes, at the man who had pushed her to the ground and

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