I sat down hard on the hallway bench, the letter still gripped in both hands, Marcus sitting down heavily beside me, his own composure finally cracking completely.
⸻
“You could have told me,” I said. “Two years, Marcus. I would have understood eventually.”
“Would you have?” he asked. “Or would you have spent every single day of her pregnancy trying to talk her out of something she’d already decided, the same way I almost did myself, more than once?”
⸻
I didn’t have an easy answer for that. I thought about every protective instinct I’d carried toward Nadia since we were children, every time I’d stepped in to smooth something over for her, defend her, manage a situation on her behalf before she’d had the chance to manage it herself.
“I probably would have,” I admitted quietly. “I don’t think I would have meant to take the choice away from her. I think I would have anyway.”
⸻
We sat together in that hallway for almost two more hours, waiting for any word from the surgical team, both of us reading Nadia’s letter again and again until the words felt worn soft from repetition.
⸻
The surgeon finally came out a little after midnight, still in scrubs, exhaustion visible in every line of her face, though her expression, thankfully, wasn’t the kind that precedes devastating news.
⸻
“She’s stable,” the surgeon said. “It was close. Her heart went into distress during delivery, exactly the risk we’d been watching for, and we had to move fast with an emergency procedure to stabilize her rhythm. But she’s stable now, and both babies are doing as well as we could have hoped at thirty-four weeks.”
⸻
Marcus made a sound I’d never heard from him before, something between a sob and a laugh, and gripped my hand again, considerably gentler this time.
⸻
