All Chapters of MARRIED IN HATRED: FELL IN LOVE AFTER SHE LEFT?: Chapter 81 - Chapter 90

JAKE'S POVThe contractions started at 2:47 in the morning, and I know the exact time because I glanced at the clock the instant Jolene's hand closed hard around my wrist, waking me from a sleep I hadn't realized was so deep until her voice cut through it, tight and urgent in a way I'd never heard from her before."Jake. Jake, wake up."I was upright before I'd fully processed what she'd said, adrenaline arriving faster than coherent thought. "What's wrong?""Contractions," she said, breathing carefully through what was clearly another one arriving even as she spoke. "Close together. Too close. I don't think this is false labor."She was thirty-six weeks along, safely past the point where the doctors had stopped worrying about serious complications from an early arrival, but still three weeks ahead of her actual due date, early enough that neither of us had finished packing the hospital bag we'd been meaning to prepare for the better part of a month."Okay," I said, forcing my voice s

JAKE'S POVThree in the morning, and the hospital had finally gone quiet enough that I could hear the small, wet clicking sounds Logan Rose made in her sleep, tiny and specific, nothing like the images I'd built up in my head over nine months of imagining this moment.Jolene was asleep, finally, exhausted past the point of dreaming, and the nurses had wheeled a small bassinet close enough to the bed that I could reach it without standing, though I hadn't been able to make myself put her down since the room had emptied of visitors an hour earlier. I sat in the stiff hospital chair with my daughter against my chest, one hand cupped instinctively around the back of her head, and studied her the way you study something you're afraid to stop looking at in case it disappears.She had my mother's mouth. I hadn't expected to notice something like that so immediately, some small physical inheritance rendering itself visible within hours of birth, but there it was, the exact shape of Rebecca's

HAILEY'S POVI'd held babies before, technically, at other people's christenings and distant cousins' first birthdays, the polite, brief holding you do when someone hands you a child and you smile for a photograph and hand them back the moment your arms start to ache. None of that prepared me for the actual, specific weight of Logan Rose, four days old, brought home from the hospital and placed carefully into my arms by a mother who trusted me enough to hand over the most precious thing she'd ever created."You have to support her head," Jolene said, though gently, watching me with more patience than I probably deserved given how visibly nervous I was."I know," I said. "I read three books about this. I watched approximately forty videos.""Of course you did," Jolene said, laughing.I settled into the armchair by the nursery window, Logan Rose warm and impossibly small against my chest, and felt something shift in my own understanding of myself, some quiet recalibration I hadn't expec

JAKE'S POVI missed her first real laugh. I found this out secondhand, from a video Jolene sent me while I sat in a conference room reviewing quarterly projections with three board members who had absolutely no idea their meeting had just cost me something I'd never get back.The video was eleven seconds long. Logan Rose, propped against a pillow on the living room floor, dissolving into sudden, delighted giggles at something Hailey was doing just out of frame. I watched it four times before the meeting resumed, my chest tight with a grief I hadn't expected fatherhood to include, the grief of milestones happening in real time while I sat somewhere else entirely, managing spreadsheets that would matter far less to me in ten years than this exact eleven seconds already did.I came home that evening later than I'd promised, another quarter-hour of unavoidable follow-up conversation stretching into forty-five minutes, and found Jolene in the kitchen, exhaustion written plainly across her

JOLENE'S POVThe first day back felt like stepping into someone else's life, my badge still valid, my locker still assigned, the hallways exactly as I'd left them three months earlier, and yet every ordinary motion, pulling on scrubs, reviewing a chart, walking into a patient's room, carried a strange new weight I hadn't anticipated.I'd pumped in the small, cramped lactation room twice already before my first patient of the day, my body still adjusting to the mechanics of feeding a child I now wasn't with for twelve hours at a stretch, and found myself, standing over the pump with my phone propped against the wall showing a video Jake had sent of Logan Rose that morning, crying quietly in a way I hoped wouldn't show on my face by the time rounds began.Amara found me there, of course, having apparently developed an uncanny instinct for locating me during exactly the moments I needed someone to."The first day back is always the hardest," she said, leaning against the doorframe. "It g