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“He’s not left her side once,” the nurse insists, chin raised. “He called the doctor over the second she coughed twice.”
And it lands all at once with a wrenching inevitability, the whole ugly shape of it. The front desk called my emergency contact tonight, and my emergency contact silenced the call twice without a glance. He was twenty feet away from me, behind one flimsy wall, and the number I chose to keep, even after I knew whose it was, reached his phone while I was still half-drowned, and he looked down, saw the front desk, and killed it so it would not wake Yelena. If I had needed him, truly needed him, if it were life or death, he wouldn’t have come.
That’s my answer, delivered in two silenced calls. I’m utterly ruined.
The older nurse notices I’m awake and nudges her colleague. The young one drops her gaze to the floor and apologizes awkwardly to me.
“You didn’t wake me,” I fib, and my voice comes out calmer and steadier than I expect it to.
After they leave, I look across the hall at the warm light that gleams under his door, past the glass. Lev is in there caring for Yelena, so devoted it’s almost sweet, in a twisted way.
I have no one, no one to press gentle lips to my temple. I bite my lip against the tears, and they slide down anyway, telltale and briny, and it feels like the seawater is draining out of me through my eyes.
I wipe at the damp trails just as the door opens and a doctor comes in with a report in his hand.
“Miss Cox, don’t strain yourself,” he says, raising the head of my bed gently. “How are you feeling?”
“Like a boat ran me over,” I say wryly.
He notes that joking is a good sign for my mental state.
“It was not a joke,” I tell him, trying to glare but failing, and the corner of his mouth twitches without quite becoming a smile.
He lists it out for me. “You have aspiration, hypoxia, and hypothermia. If they had pulled you out much later, this would’ve been far worse than a hospital stay. You could’ve gone to meet your maker.”
My lungs seize, and a choked wheeze escapes me, but I ask him anyway. “Am I okay now?”
“You’re stable,” he says on an exhale. “I recommend observation, and no high-risk activities for a while.”
“I didn’t exactly volunteer for a swim,” I say sarcastically. “I’m never getting on a yacht again as long as I live.”
His expression grows heavier, his mouth drooping. “There’s one more thing I need to tell you.”
“What is it?” I ask, a small voice in my head already steeling itself for the worst.
“Your blood work shows that you’re pregnant.”
My back goes cold, my pulse rocketing, and every sound drops out of the room at once. “What the hell? Say that again,” I whisper, face scrunched, half convinced I’m having hallucinations.
“You’re in early pregnancy. About two months along.” My hand drops to my flat abdomen without my telling it to move, to the place where the swell of my belly will someday be.
“That’s impossible,” I say, the words streaming out of me, but he only shakes his head at me. “The tests don’t lie, Miss Cox. Think back to your last cycle.”
My late period, weeks ago now, not long after that night with his large body stretched across the bed. Weeks of nausea I kept blaming on stress and bad luck and that ruined email. The green pasta smell that turned my stomach. The champagne I could not stand to be near. It all clicks into place at once, irregular and undeniable, and I feel like the world’s biggest fool for not seeing it sooner. Little dunce, I scold myself.
My fingertips tingle, the fear pricking my skin into goosepimples, and my voice cracks apart. “Is the baby okay?”
“The hypothermia and the hypoxia put your body under real stress. There were signs of a threatened miscarriage.” He pauses, and his mouth twists. “It is stable for now.”
I stare at pulsing numbers I can’t read, my breathing going shallower. “Is the baby okay,” I ask again, and this time I put force behind the words.
“It appears so,” he answers reluctantly. “I cannot promise there will be no effects at all. The child may have weaker immunity later in life. You need rest, no stress, and regular checkups, and it is important to stay well nourished.”
Each unnerving word drives into my skull like a nail, threatened miscarriage and hypoxia and weaker immunity, one right after another.
There was another whole life inside me the entire time I was drowning out there, gasping and screaming for a man who swam right past me. Lev didn’t just abandon me tonight. He abandoned his own child in that black water and never once knew it was there to abandon.
You fucked up, Lev.
