CHAPTER 6

The bottle slips from my fingers and hits the carpet.

It doesn’t break. It just rolls to a stop against the leg of the chair, small and brown and harmless, like it hasn’t been sitting in my bag for months, waiting.

“Serena.” Elias is in front of me before I even see him move. His hands close around my shoulders. “Look at me. Breathe.”

“I drank it.” My voice comes out thin and strange, like it belongs to someone standing far away. “Every morning. For three years.”

“We don’t know what it is yet.”

“He knew.” I look up at him, and the room blurs. “Damien wrote it down on a page from a prescription pad. He knew, Elias. Why would he write that unless it was…”

I can’t finish the sentence.

Because if I finish it, it becomes real. And if it becomes real, then every miscarriage, every night I sat on the bathroom floor with my hands pressed over my mouth so no one would hear me, every time I whispered what is wrong with me, it all becomes something else.

Something that was done to me.

“Hey.” Elias’s voice is very gentle. “Stop. Don’t go down that road yet. Not tonight.”

“Don’t tell me not to go. I’m already there.”

My knees give way, and he guides me onto the chair like I weigh nothing. He crouches in front of me, his hands warm over my cold ones, and for a moment neither of us says anything.

“Okay,” he says finally. “Here’s what we’re going to do. We’re not going to touch it with bare hands. We’re not going to drink another drop. And we’re not going to decide anything until we know what’s in it.”

“And if it’s…”

“Then we’ll deal with that too. One thing at a time.”

He goes to the kitchen and comes back with a clean plastic bag. He picks up the bottle with the bag turned inside out over his fingers, seals it, and sets it on the counter. The way he handles it, so careful and so professional, makes something inside me crack.

Because that is how doctors handle evidence.

“Elias.” My voice shakes. “She’s my mother.”

“I know.”

“When I was seven, I had a fever for four days. She sat on the edge of my bed the entire time. She hummed this old song while she braided my hair, and when I threw up, she held it back.” I wipe my face with the back of my hand. I didn’t even notice I was crying. “She isn’t warm. She never was. But she did that. She did that, Elias. Tell me that wasn’t fake.”

His jaw tightens. He says nothing, and the silence is worse than any answer.

“I could be wrong,” he says at last. “She might not have known what she was giving you. People can be used.”

“Used by who?”

“I don’t know.”

It isn’t enough. It isn’t anywhere near enough. But it’s honest, and tonight honesty is the only thing I have the strength to hold onto.

I press my hand flat against my stomach. Under my palm, there is nothing. No movement, no sign. Just a seven-week-old heartbeat I heard for the first time today.

“What if I’ve already hurt it?” I whisper. “What if the baby…”

“The scan was perfect. Strong heartbeat, normal development. You stopped taking it the morning of the ceremony.” He squeezes my fingers. “Whatever was in that bottle, you haven’t had a drop in days. You’re okay. The baby is okay.”

I let out a breath I didn’t know I was holding, and my eyes sting all over again.

I let a lot of things go tonight. I let him hold my hands. I let him see me like this.

“Come on,” he says. “Sit with me. You don’t have to be strong right now.”

So I stop trying.

I fold forward until my forehead touches his shoulder, and the sobs I’ve been swallowing all day finally break loose. They aren’t loud. They’re ugly and quiet, the kind that shake your whole body and leave you hollow. Elias doesn’t say anything. He just wraps one arm around my back and holds on, rocking slightly, the way you hold a child who’s had a nightmare.

I cry for the miscarriages. I cry for the nights I told myself it was my fault. I cry for the little girl whose mother held her hair, and for the woman who is only now learning what that hand might have been holding.

Midnight comes quietly.

I’m still on the chair, wrapped in a blanket Elias found somewhere, when my phone buzzes against the cushion. I switched it back on an hour ago, desperate for any distraction. Now I wish I hadn’t.

The first thing on the screen is a voicemail from my mother, left at 11:56.

I almost delete it. Instead, my thumb presses play.

“Serena.” Her voice is thin, almost unrecognizable. “Please come home. Your father is very angry and I can’t… I can’t fix it this time. Just come back and say you’re sorry. Please, darling. I’m asking you.”

The message ends.

I sit there with my heart pounding. A week ago I would have heard a frightened mother. Tonight I hear every word twice, once as love and once as something I don’t have a name for yet, and I can’t tell which one is real.

Then the phone buzzes again.

A bank alert.

Your account has been restricted. Please contact the issuing branch.

I frown and open the banking app. A red banner stretches across the top of the screen. Every account. Savings, checking, the credit cards I haven’t touched in years. Frozen.

Another buzz. A second alert. And a third.

The phone vibrates again and again in my hands, like it’s laughing at me. Then an email appears from the Vance Hospital human resources department, timestamped 12:00 a.m. exactly.

Dear Dr. Vance, we confirm receipt of your resignation, effective immediately. All hospital privileges, access cards, and staff benefits have been suspended. Please return all hospital property within 48 hours.

I read it once. Twice.

I never resigned.

Attached to the email is a scanned letter in my name, with my signature at the bottom, copied so perfectly it makes my stomach turn. I know whose hand moved the pen. I just don’t want to believe it.

“Midnight,” I say softly.

“What?” Elias looks up from the sofa, where he has been pretending to read.

“He said I had until midnight.” I hold out the phone with a hand that doesn’t feel like mine. “My father. He froze everything, Elias. All of it. And he made me resign. He forged my signature.”

Elias takes the phone and reads in silence. A muscle jumps in his jaw.

“That bastard,” he says, quietly and with feeling.

I laugh. It comes out cracked and wet. “He didn’t even call me first. He gave me a deadline, and when I didn’t obey, he just…”

My voice breaks.

Twenty-eight years. Twenty-eight years of coming first in my class, of working double shifts, of smiling at his dinners and swallowing every insult, of giving up Boston because he told me it was for the family. And all it takes to erase me is one email at midnight.

Not even a cruel one. Just polite. Just administrative.

That’s the part that hurts most. He doesn’t hate me. I’m simply not worth the effort of hating.

“You have me,” Elias says. “And you have a license, and a brain, and hands that save lives. They can’t freeze that.”

“I know.” I wipe my face. “I know that. It’s just…”

“I know.”

Before I can say more, my phone rings in his hand.

Unknown number.

We exchange a look. He puts it on speaker and hands it back.

“Hello?”

“Dr. Vance?” A woman’s voice, crisp and calm, with a thread of something warm underneath. “I’m very sorry to call at this hour. My name is Naomi Park. I’m an attorney.”

I sit up slowly. “I think you have the wrong number.”

“I don’t believe I do. You’re Beatrice Vance’s granddaughter. Serena.”

My heart stumbles.

My grandmother has been dead for six years.

“What is this about?” I ask carefully.

“I’d prefer not to discuss it over the phone. Your grandmother left certain instructions with my firm before she passed. They were to be carried out only if a particular event occurred.” A short pause. “Tonight I received confirmation that it has.”

“What event?”

“Your divorce, Dr. Vance.”

The room goes very still.

Elias is staring at me. I can hear my own pulse in my ears.

“We need to talk tomorrow,” Naomi Park says. “In person, and somewhere private. And Dr. Vance? Please don’t mention this call to anyone. Especially not to your parents or their lawyers.”

“Why?” My voice is a whisper. “What did she leave me?”

The line is quiet for a moment.

“Everything they’ve been trying to take from you.”

Then the call ends, and I’m left holding a phone that suddenly feels heavier than anything I have ever carried.