CHAPTER 7 — The Message on His Screen
Grace survived the surgery.
The doctors repaired a complication involving her heart, but they warned me that the next forty-eight hours would be critical.
I sat beside her through the entire night.
My hand remained inside the incubator, one finger resting beneath her tiny palm.
At four in the morning, she closed her fingers around me.
That small grip felt stronger than every promise Alex had ever made.
He arrived shortly after sunrise.
He stood behind the NICU glass, watching Grace from the hallway.
For several minutes, I pretended not to see him.
Then I walked outside.
“You shouldn’t be here.”
“I heard about the surgery.”
“Who told you?”
“The hospital called me. I’m still legally her father.”
The words struck harder than I expected.
Alex looked through the glass.
“Is she going to live?”
“I don’t know.”
His face collapsed.
“Can I see her?”
I wanted to say no.
I wanted him to feel one fraction of the helplessness he had given me.
But Grace was not a weapon.
I stepped aside.
“You can stand at the glass. You are not entering the NICU.”
Alex nodded.
He placed one hand against the window.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered.
I did not know whether he was speaking to Grace or to himself.
His phone vibrated.
The screen lit up in his hand.
Valerie’s name appeared.
Beneath it was a message preview.
You promised Lucy would never learn about that night.
Alex quickly turned the phone over.
Too late.
I had already seen it.
“What night?”
His face drained of color.
“Lucy—”
“What night, Alex?”
“It isn’t what you think.”
I laughed once.
A broken, exhausted sound.
“That sentence should be carved onto our marriage certificate.”
He reached for me.
I stepped back.
“Tell me.”
“It happened two months ago.”
The hallway seemed to tilt.
“What happened?”
Alex closed his eyes.
“Valerie came to the station after my shift. She had been drinking. We went to her apartment.”
“How many times?”
“Once.”
“Did you sleep with her?”
His silence lasted only three seconds.
But those three seconds ended fourteen years of my life.
“Yes.”
I stared at the man I had loved since I was twenty-one.
The man who had touched my stomach afterward.
The man who had slept beside me while our daughter grew inside me.
Alex began speaking quickly.
“It meant nothing. I regretted it immediately. I told her it could never happen again.”
I looked through the glass at Grace.
“Leave.”
“Lucy, please let me explain.”
“You already did.”
His phone vibrated again.
May you like
This time, Valerie’s message filled the screen.
Ask him where he was the night before the elevator.
