All Chapters of The Billionaire Waitress : Chapter 41

The Greenwich hospital room was a sterile prison, its antiseptic reek burning my lungs as I hunched by Kayla’s bedside, the February 2028 frost clawing at the window’s clouded glass. My forehead pulsed under fresh stitches, the crash’s carnage (blood streaming down my face, glass shredding my palms) still raw from that late January night three weeks ago. Kayla lay still, her jet-black hair fanning across the pillow, her plus-sized frame dwarfed by the thin hospital sheet, tubes snaking from her arms like cruel vines. Her brown eyes, once ablaze when she’d snapped at me in The Gilded Spoon’s kitchen in 2024, were sealed shut, trapped in a coma the doctors called “potentially permanent.” The monitors’ relentless beeps taunted me, each one a cruel reminder of the silence where our daughter’s heartbeat had stopped. “Placental rupture,” Dr. Patel had said, his voice cold as the scalpel that couldn’t save her. “The trauma was too severe.” Our child, due in April, was gone, a loss that carve