Chapter 16 – Noa
The hospital room swiftly transforms into a pristine purgatory I am left to fester in.
The only sounds are the incessant beeping of the monitor beside me and the faint hum of air conditioning filtering cool, stale air through the vents.
The walls are the same, sterile white that matches the coarse-feeling sheets beneath me.
It doesn’t feel like a place of healing.
It is another prison, just one with an antiseptic stench.
I clutch the scratchy blanket to my chest and try to suppress the chill that keeps seeping into my bones. It’s not from the temperature. Every cell in my body is fraught with overwhelm—and I’ve had nothing but time to dwell on it, to panic and spiral and cry.
Matías left me.
That was two days ago. Two days of silence and of empty space where he should be.
I don’t know where he went. I don’t know if he’s coming back, or if he’s decided I should remain here until I carry this child to term—or...
I’ve considered darker possibilities, fallen into fitful sleep to awaken sobbing from nightmares of being held down and forced to terminate this baby.
He hasn’t returned to confirm or quell my fears.
I’ve thought of it endlessly, how the last time I saw him, he was walking out of this room without looking back. I’ve cried over the memory of the look in his eyes—detached, hollow—that it haunts me more than any of the words he spat before he left.
Is his absence worse than his questions? I don’t know.
No number of deep breaths help. My head still feels light, my body struggling to adjust after the collapse.
The doctor told me to take it easy, to rest—and then denied me, over and over, every request for the phone that has been removed from my room.
I can’t call him. Or Renata. Not even my own mother.
I’m left, alone, unmoored. The doctor still says to keep myself calm.
How can I, when everything inside me is unraveling? I just stare at the ceiling, the fluorescent overhead lighting buzzing mindlessly, and lose track of time.
I can’t say how long it’s been when the door finally flies open for him.
But eventually, a day comes where Matías returns.
He enters the room. He doesn’t make a sound, but his silence is deafening.
He’s missing his suit jacket now, but it’s the same shirt’s sleeves rolled up to his elbows.
The veins in his forearms are visible beneath the surface of his tanned skin.
His dark hair is unkempt, and the top buttons of his shirt are undone.
Regardless, it’s his face that stuns me.
The rigid line of his jaw, the faint shadow of stubble covering his cheeks.
The purpled smudges beneath his vacant eyes.
He looks like he hasn’t slept. Like he’s been chain-smoking through the night, dragging nicotine into his lungs just to keep himself from thinking. He reeks of smoke.
I swallow hard. My voice quivers in time with my bottom lip, and it feels foolish to state, “You left,” but the words leave me without permission.
He doesn’t deign to respond. He simply leans against the wall, arms crossing over his chest, and looks towards me without ever looking right at me. It’s unbearable.
I can’t take it.
“Matías, please listen to me—” I grapple.
There no time. We’re always running out of time.
The door swings open again.
Glowering, my heart pounding a tattoo in my throat, I snap my head toward the entrance. If it isn’t Matías walking away again and again, then it’s something else, isn’t it? I don’t know if I’m ready for it.
Ready or not, the doctor saunters in all the same, clutching a clipboard in one hand and adjusting his glasses with the other.
He regards Matías with all the respect and dignity I’ve been deprived of the last few days.
"Se?ora Castillo," he greets, like that isn’t the case. "Let's get started. I’m going to give you an ultrasound today so we can get a clearer picture of where we’re at. You’ve answered questions well, but there’s only so much patient history tells us. "
My pulse stumbles, erratic. I should tell Matías to leave. He barely looks at me, arms still crossed, leaning against the wall like he wishes he were anywhere else.
And yet—I know it could be worse. It will be.
I’d tell him to leave, if I ever thought he’d listen. If this was about my choice at all. But it isn’t; I know it, the damned doctor knows it, and Matías definitely knows it. He still, somehow, isn’t satisfied with that. He just looks miserable.
The doctor doesn’t wait for permission. He moves efficiently, rolling the ultrasound machine closer to the bed. I gulp hard when he tugs up my hospital gown, exposing my stomach to the cool air.
Matías doesn’t move from his post.
The machine hums to life. The doctor squeezes gel onto the wand, and the first shock of cold makes me inhale sharply. I fix my gaze back on the ceiling, willing myself to stay steady, to control the trembling in my fingers.
The end is coming, whether I’m ready or not.
The wand presses down.
And then—
The screen flickers, the dim glow casting a soft, pulsing light over the room. Then, the sound fills the silence. A heartbeat. Rapid, insistent, alive. The doctor adjusts the wand slightly, and the noise deepens, thudding through the monitor like a drum.
Ba-dum. Ba-dum. Ba-dum.
I stop breathing.
This is real. This is happening.
The blurry, flickering image on the screen isn’t just a mass of cells or a vague idea.
It’s life. A heartbeat. A beginning.
Mine.
I press my lips together, willing the rush of emotions back down, but they don’t listen.
They crash through me in a violent, unrelenting wave—fear, disbelief, awe.
But none of them compare to the crushing weight of the man beside me.
Matías hasn’t spoken a word. Hasn’t moved.
Hasn’t blinked. His entire body is locked, his arms folded so tightly across his chest that I can see the sharp tension in his shoulders, the way his fingers dig into his own skin.
Then the doctor frowns slightly.
I can't breathe.
"You’re measuring close to ten weeks," the doctor says, glancing at me over the rim of her glasses. "Are you sure of your dates?"
I had told him when we’d gotten married. Oh, God.
My hands clench the thin sheet beneath me, my nails digging into the fabric. My chest tightens, my vision tunneling on the flickering screen, on the fragile, rapid rhythm of a heart that is not mine.
Ten weeks.
Ten weeks ago…
A shadow stirs in my mind. A ghost from my past. A mistake I never allowed myself to acknowledge until now. The last time I was with anyone before Matías. The only time in years. The name lodges itself in my throat, but I don’t dare let it slip.
Matías stiffens beside me.
He still isn’t looking at me—but as he hones in on the screen, it isn’t a revulsion I see. He looks baffled. He’s doing the math.
A brief eternity passes, my breath held, until he pivots my way at last.
"Ten weeks,” he echoes emptily.
I try to swallow, but my throat is too dry. "That… that has to be wrong," I try, lying through my teeth now. A sweat’s broken atop my lip. I taste salt.
The doctor doesn’t look uncertain. “The measurements are accurate,” he assures, either outright obtuse or wretchedly unhelpful. “You're farther along than you thought.”
His voice sends a chill down my spine when he speaks next. “Tomás was in Argentina for a fortnight, ten weeks ago. It couldn’t have been him.”
The words hang between us like an executioner’s axe. A final judgment.
I can’t breathe. I can’t move.
Because he’s right. And he knows it.
"Matías—"
His name barely leaves my lips before he exhales sharply and steps back.
It hits first in his eyes—raw, unguarded desolation, there and gone in the space of a breath.
A fracture in the mask he wears so well, but then the moment evaporates.
His shoulders square, his expression smoothing over like wet cement setting into stone.
Whatever breaks inside him is rendered no more than a trick, buried beneath the cool indifference that slides into place.
It’s detachment.
"Then tell me, Noa," he says bleakly. "Whose is it?"
I recoil, tears spilling hotly down my cheeks. "It doesn’t matter."
Now that I know his laugh, the haunted, mirthless huff he now spits my way is all the cheaper an imitation of it. "No?" he taunts indifferently.
“He isn’t in my life,” I convince, pushing the blankets from my body to shove out of the bed I’ve been sequestered in for days. “He won’t be in my life. He already isn’t. Please, Matías—just let this go."
His expression, if possible, hardens. "Let it go?" Again, there’s that bitter, brittle hoax of a laugh; at my expense, or his own, I can’t say. "You don’t get to decide that, Noa. Not anymore."