Chapter 6: The Empty Room

Olivia's POV

"Mrs. Ashford, can you hear me?"

I blinked like a sandy particle fell into my eyes. The ceiling came into focus first. A single fluorescent light humming above me.

"Mrs. Ashford."

I turned my head. A doctor stood beside the bed. She looked young with her careful eyes, and I believe someone of this kind had already learned how to deliver bad news without flinching. She was holding a clipboard against her chest like a shield.

"I can hear you," I said. My voice came out worried, yearning for what she'd utter next.

She sat in the chair beside me, the one Ethan had sat in and then left. She didn't waste time, I was grateful for that. I love real clarity in people, I detest the act of beating about the bush at first in people, thinking they're being kind, but they're not.

"The baby is still there," she said.

The air rushed back into my lungs.

"However." She paused. "The impact caused a subchorionic hematoma. Internal bleeding between the uterine wall and the placental membrane. It is not small. The baby is at critical risk right now, and that risk stays elevated for the next several weeks."

I stared at her.

"What do I need to do?"

"Complete bed rest for at least two weeks without stress, no strain, nothing that elevates your heart rate significantly." She looked at me directly. "Mrs. Ashford, if you do not rest, you will lose this pregnancy."

She said a few more things thereafter about numbers, percentages, follow-up appointments. I listened to all of it, but it escaped through my left ear, because the only sentence that mattered was already sitting in the center of my chest like a stone dropped into still water.

The baby is still there.

She left. The door clicked shut behind her.

I lay completely still and looked at the ceiling and felt the stone ripple outward, quietly, through every part of me.

No one was coming. The chair beside my bed was empty and cold and I was alone in a room that smelled like antiseptic and recycled air, and I know outside here, Ethan was probably still sitting with Mara, making sure she was comfortable and she could breathe.

I thought about his voice through the gap in the doors. Mara. He said her name first.

I thought about Mara asking him, in the room next door, if he had fallen in love with me. And I thought about the silence that answered her. That long, terrible silence that said more than any word he had ever given me in two years of marriage.

A terrible emotion shifted inside me without breaking. The opposite of breaking, actually, like a bone hanging in my throat which requires water to be set to its place. It hurts, but it is the right kind of hurt.

I was not going to tell him about the baby.

The decision arrived quietly, without drama. And it's not even about revenge this time or anger. No! The reason for my decision was simpler: I did not know yet what I was going to do, and until I did, the baby was mine alone to protect. The only thing in this hospital room that belonged entirely to me.

I closed my eyes.

I was almost asleep when the door opened.

"Mrs. Ashford?" A nurse, younger than the doctor, stepped in carefully. "Someone left this at the front desk for you."

She held out an envelope.

No name on the outside. Just a cream colored rectangle, sealed at the back, the paper slightly thicker than ordinary. I took it from her and she left without another word.

I turned it over in my hands.

Another emotion about the weight of it made my heart slow down.

I slid my finger under the seal and opened it. What I found inside was a single sheet of paper, folded in thirds. The handwriting hit me before the words did. I recognized it the way you recognize a voice in a crowd, instantly, from a distance, without being able to explain how.

Richard.

Richard Ashford's handwriting. The looping careful R, the way he pressed harder on the downstrokes, the slight leftward lean of every letter. I had grown up watching that handwriting on birthday cards, on company memos he would show me to explain how business worked, on the notes he tucked into my university acceptance letter that he pretended he had nothing to do with.

He had been dead for three weeks.

My hands were trembling now. I could feel it in my fingers, in the paper itself.

I read the first line.

*Olivia, if you are reading this, things have gone exactly as I feared they would.*

I read the second line.

*I am sorry I could not prevent it, but I prepared for it. Everything you need is already in place.*

The door opened.

I folded the letter in a single motion, tucked it under my thigh, pulled the sheet up over it with the back of my hand. The movement was so fast it surprised me. My body acted before my mind decided anything.

I looked up.

Ethan stood in the doorway.

He looked different from when he left. An unusual feeling had moved across his face while he was gone and had not fully left. His jaw was set, his shoulders carrying a tension that looked like guilt. In his right hand he held a folded set of papers looking white and formal. The edge of a lawyer's letterhead was visible at the top.

He came into the room slowly. He didn't sit down. He stood at the foot of the bed and looked at me, and I looked back at him, and the machines beeped steadily between us.

"I think," he said, his voice barely above a whisper, each word placed down like something fragile and heavy at the same time. "I think we need to talk about letting each other go.”