PREGNANT AND BANISHED のすべてのチャプター: チャプター 31 - チャプター 36

Lana's POV.Time behaves oddly when your child is unwell.It stretches and compresses all at once every second in that room feels both endless and terrifyingly fleeting. I made my way to Jacob's bedside in just four strides, pressing the back of my hand against his forehead before I even realized I was moving. The heat radiating from his skin sent a chilling jolt straight through my chest. It was too high, way too high."Jacob." I cradled his face in my hands. His eyelids fluttered. "Sweetheart, look at me."He turned toward my voice just like he always had, even as a tiny baby, and for a brief moment, something inside me relaxed. But then his eyes opened, and I noticed the glassy look in them — that particular unfocused gaze I had seen creep into the eyes of three confirmed patients over the past two weeks and the tension inside me tightened once more."Mummy." His voice was hoarse. Smaller than usual."I'm here." I gently brushed his hair back from his forehead, giving myself a coup

Lana's POV.The note was written in red, not ink because I could tell the difference. After fourteen years in the medical field, I was all too familiar with that rusty brown color that red ink pretended to be but never quite achieved. This was something else entirely. It had been pressed into the paper with intention, something that required a deliberate touch, and the letters were careful, unhurried, which somehow felt worse than if they had been scrawled in a panic.“You cannot save what was already chosen.”Seven words. I read them twice, my eyes tracing each letter with a clinical detachment I reached for like others might reach for prayer. The paper had been folded once and pinned through the center, indicating that whoever had placed it there had lingered at this door long enough to find a pin, to fold the paper thoughtfully, to smooth it out before pressing it into place.A shiver coursed through me in one smooth wave, starting at the base of my skull and traveling down my spi

Lana's POV.The door swung shut behind him, and the lab fell into a silence so complete it felt manufactured.I stood in the space where Asher had been standing seconds before, still warm with the particular atmospheric charge he always left behind, and tried to remember how to breathe without thinking about it. He had moved quickly, phone already pressed to his ear before he'd cleared the threshold, the pale corridor light swallowing him whole. I had tried. I had angled my gaze just enough, that old clinical instinct reaching for information the way it always did but the screen had caught the light wrong, or the moment had been too brief, and all I'd registered was a white flash before the door closed and he was gone.I exhaled slowly. The fluorescent lights hadn't softened. The lab still carried its permanent smell of antiseptic and the faint metallic undertone of the compound I'd been breaking down for the past three hours. Everything was exactly as it had been before he walked in