05 Come Get ME

Elena’s POV

Every single breath felt like inhaling shards of broken glass and the harsh antiseptic glare of the ambulance ceiling lights pierced straight through my closed eyelids.

I was lying on a stretcher with a stiff plastic cervical collar biting into my neck while the paramedic hastily pressed a cold oxygen mask over my face.

“Keep her still,” a voice called somewhere above me. “Pulse is dropping. We need to move fast.”

Through the hazy fog of shock and pain my gaze drifted toward the front of the rushing vehicle. Julian sat on the bench seat opposite my stretcher with his broad shoulders hunched forward. But he wasn't looking at me.. he wasn't holding my trembling bruised hand.

Instead, he was leaning over a whimpering Bianca who was draped in a thermal blanket like a delicate Victorian princess caught in a summer shower.

“You're okay. I've got you,” Julian murmured with protective panic that he had never once shown for me as he gently brushed a stray lock of dark hair away from her forehead, his thumb lingering on her cheek with tenderness.

A bitter metallic taste filled my mouth but it wasn't from the crash. It was humiliation.

When the ambulance finally screeched to a halt outside the county hospital emergency bay, medical staff swarmed the back doors with precision, shouting rapid-fire medical terms, wheeling my stretcher out into the bright frantic chaos of the trauma ward.

“Sir, you need to stay behind the yellow line,” a nurse snapped, blocking Julian as he tried to follow Bianca’s gurney instead of mine.

Julian hesitated with his dark eyes flickering between the trauma bay doors where Bianca had vanished and the narrow curtained cubicle where they were wheeling me. For one fleeting and pathetic second, I held my breath. I wanted him to choose his wife.. I wanted him to step across that line and prove that three years of marriage actually meant something.

He took half a step toward my cubicle with his mouth parting as if to speak.

Then a nurse came rushing out, calling, “Mr. Sterling? Your friend’s blood pressure is spiking. She's asking for you.”

Julian didn't look back. He turned on his heel and disappeared down the corridor, leaving me entirely alone with strangers in blue scrubs.

Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right, I hysterically thought, staring up at the tiles of the hospital ceiling as a sharp pain ran through my lower abdomen.

***

The next two hours blurred together in a painful cycle of smells, cold metal instruments and hushed medical whispers. An overworked ER doctor gently pressed a warm ultrasound wand across my bruised stomach with his face settling into a grim, professional mask.

“We need to run some urgent blood panels and a secondary scan, Mrs. Sterling,” the doctor said quietly, refusing to meet my eyes. “Given the severity of the trauma from the fall, your body is under extreme physical stress. We're monitoring the fetus very closely.”

“Is my baby okay?” I whispered with my voice cracking snd tears finally spilling over my lashes to pool against my temples.

“The baby is fine. But you need rest,” he answered before stepping out of the small curtained room.

I pushed myself up off the examination table. My bare feet touched the freezing floor, sending a fresh wave of nausea rolling through my stomach.

I grabbed a discarded hospital gown, threw it over my shoulders like a shield and crept out into the quiet, fluorescent-lit hallway.

The hospital was eerily still at this hour as I limped slowly toward the private VIP consultation wing, following the soft murmur of voices drifting from an open office door at the end of the hall.

I froze outside Dr. Evans's private office where Julian’s deep and tense voice carried clearly through the gap in the doorway. 

“Are you absolutely certain, Doctor? There's no mistake?”

“I am positive, Mr. Sterling,” Dr. Evans replied with his tone laced with careful professional caution. “The hormone levels and the ultrasound confirmation leave no doubt. Bianca is in the early stages of a healthy pregnancy. Roughly six weeks along.”

The air rushed violently out of my lungs.

Six weeks..?!

Six weeks ago.. Marcus had been dead for over a year. Six weeks ago Bianca was already living in her mansion of grief, crying into Julian's shoulder every single night while her dead husband's best friend played the devoted savior.

“Six weeks,” Julian repeated in a disbelieving whisper that sounded less like shock and more like a terrifying irreversible awakening. “God... Marcus...”

“Given the circumstances of the upcoming anniversary and the emotional trauma she's experienced,” the doctor continued, oblivious to the fact that a ghost was bleeding out in the hallway outside his door, “she's going to need immense stability. As the father, you'll need to be fully prepared for...”

I didn't hear the rest. The walls of the white corridor suddenly tilted sideways.

The math suddenly clicked into my brain. While I was at home planning our anniversary dinner, while I was carefully hiding my own two blue lines in a velvet clutch, Julian was busy planting his own child inside the woman who lived in our shadow! Every excuse, every late-night rescue mission and every defensive scream when I dared to question their toxic bond all clicked into place with sickening clarity.

I wasn't a wife.. I was a convenient alibi and a legal shield to hide a scandalous affair with a dead man's widow..!

The pain in my ribs burnrd hot but it was nothing compared to the dead hollow numbness spreading through my chest. 

The fragile desperate girl who had spent three years begging for scraps of affection from a man who never loved her finally died right there on the linoleum floor.

I turned around and with slow agonizing steps, I limped back down the corridor, gripping the wall for support until I reached the quiet corner of the emergency lobby.

My hands shook violently as I pulled my cracked phone from the pocket of my sweatpants. My thumb hovered over the screen, tapping out a number I knew by heart...  the only person who had ever truly looked out for me.

The phone rang twice before a familiar voice answered. Warm, calm, and steady.

“So, you finally decided to call me.”

I couldn’t speak. The sobs I’d been holding back came pouring out, and I pressed the phone to my ear as if that would make everything better.

“Elena?” His voice was alarmed now. “What’s wrong? Are you okay?”

I sucked in a shaky breath, forcing the words out through the tears. “I need you to prepare the divorce papers for me. And come pick me up...”

* * *