Everything moved so fast I barely felt the bed beneath me. My vision faded again as voices blended into one desperate blur, and then the bright surgical lights washed over me.
Ethan scrubbed in without wasting a second. Bleeding mother. Twins in distress. Minutes to act. It was the kind of crisis he had faced countless times.
Then he walked into the operating room.
The nurse stepped aside.
He saw my face.
“Hannah…”
The word escaped before he could stop it.
No one else reacted. There wasn’t time. But for Ethan, the world had just stopped.
Five years vanished in an instant.
He remembered the scholarship fundraiser where I had been serving champagne in a thrift-store sweater, the tiny apartment where we laughed over takeout, and every impossible dream we once believed we could build together.
Then he remembered the night everything ended.
Outside his mother’s mansion, rain poured between us while he accused me of betraying him. I begged him to believe me, but he trusted elegant lies from powerful people instead of the woman who loved him.
