Chapter 19 Cassian #2
"She didn't want you to see. She made sure of that." Cathy reached across and took my hand, her grip warm and steady. "She signed all the paperwork herself and listed herself as her own emergency contact. She asked us specifically not to notify anyone."
"Why? Why would she do that?"
"I asked her the same thing." Cathy squeezed my hand. "She said your marriage was already dying. Said she didn't want to trap you with guilt and didn't want a baby to be the reason you stayed with someone you didn't want to be with anymore."
"I never stopped wanting to be with her." The words tore out of me with desperation. "She was everything to me. She's always been everything to me."
"Then tell her that." Cathy released my hand and stood. "She's been carrying this alone for five years. That's long enough."
I sat in that break room for a long time after Cathy left.
The afternoon light shifted across the walls, and I watched it without seeing, my mind replaying every moment of those final months of our marriage. Every fight. Every silence. Every night I'd lay beside her in the dark, wondering why she felt so far away.
She'd been grieving alone. While I'd been too wrapped up in my own frustration to notice.
I pulled out my phone and stared at the screen. Calla's name was right there in my contacts, one tap away. I could call her, demand answers, and rage for keeping this from me—for making decisions about our family without me, for carrying a burden that should have been ours to share.
But the anger wouldn't come.
All I felt was grief. For the baby we'd never know. For the wife who'd suffered alone. For all the years we'd wasted, both of us too stubborn and too scared to fight for what we had.
I drove back to Obsidian as the sun was setting.
The hospital was quieter when I arrived, the daytime chaos giving way to the steadier rhythm of the evening shift. I found Calla in the physician's lounge on the fourth floor, sitting by the window with a cup of coffee, staring out at the city lights coming on below.
"Calla."
She turned at the sound of my voice.
"Cassian? What's wrong?"
"We need to talk."
I didn't lead her anywhere. I didn't care about privacy anymore or who saw or what they thought. The investigation was still ongoing, and none of that mattered.
None of it had ever mattered.
"The ethics investigation… They pulled your medical records from Metropolitan. From five years ago."
Calla went pale.
"I saw the file," I continued. "The D&C. The pregnancy. And then I drove to Metropolitan and found Cathy."
Her hands started to shake and her whole body was trembling. Each second that passed, I could see walls crumble.
"She told me everything." My voice broke on the words.
"Cassian—"
"You were pregnant with our baby. And you lost it alone in a hospital bed while I was in surgery, and you never said a word.
Not when I came home that night. Not in the weeks that followed.
Not during the divorce or the five years after.
You just carried it. Alone. Like it was something you had to survive by yourself. "
"I was going to tell you,” she mumbled, tears streaming down her face. "I was trying to find the right moment, but we were fighting so much and I didn't know how—"
"How to what? Trust me? Let me be there for you?"
"Yes!" The word exploded out of her. "I didn't know how to tell you I was pregnant when I wasn't even sure you wanted to stay married to me. I didn't know how to ask you to be happy about a baby when everything between us was falling apart."
"So you said nothing.”
"You were saving someone's life." Her voice cracked. "There was a patient on your table who needed you. I checked the surgical schedule. A gunshot wound and multiple organ damage. You were the only one who could save him."
"I would have left." I stepped closer, my own tears falling unchecked. "If you had called me, if you had asked, I would have walked out of that OR and come to you. You were my wife. That was our child. Nothing was more important than that."
"I didn't believe that." She sobbed, the sound torn from somewhere deep inside her. "I didn't believe I was more important than your work, because I never put you above mine. How could I expect something I wasn't willing to give?"
"By asking. By trusting me enough to let me make that choice!”
"I was scared!" The words ripped out of her.
"I was terrified that you would stay out of guilt.
That we would have the baby and you would resent me for trapping you.
That I would become my mother, giving up everything for a family and spending the rest of my life looking out windows, wondering what I'd lost."
"So instead you lost everything alone. The baby.
The marriage. Me." I grabbed her hands, holding on like she might disappear if I let go.
"Do you have any idea what it would have meant to me?
To grieve with you? To hold you in that moment instead of finding out five years later that I failed you when you needed me most? "
"You didn't fail me." Her face was a mess of tears, her voice barely audible. "I failed you. I failed us. I made a choice that wasn't mine to make alone, and I have regretted it every single day since."
I looked at her. I'd loved her for seven years, married for four, mourned for five. She had been so afraid of needing me that she'd chosen to shatter alone rather than let me catch her.
I dropped to my knees.
The tile was cold beneath me, but I didn't care. I didn't care about the people stopping to stare or the whispers starting to spread or anything except the woman standing in front of me with five years of grief finally breaking through.
"Cassian, what are you—"
"I love you," I confessed, my words came out wrecked, desperate, and torn.
"I have loved you every single day since I met you.
Through the fighting and the silence and the divorce and the five years of pretending I'd moved on.
I have carried you inside me like something I couldn't cut out no matter how hard I tried. "
"Cassian—"
"I thought losing you was the price I had to pay for wanting too much.
For not being enough. For choosing work when I should have chosen you.
" I gripped her hands tighter, my whole body shaking.
"But I didn't lose you because we stopped loving each other.
I lost you because we were both so terrified of being hurt that we forgot how to hold on. "
Calla was staring at me, tears pouring down her face, her breath coming in ragged gasps.
"I'm not scared anymore," I said. "I'm terrified, but I'm not letting that stop me. Not this time. Not ever again."
I brought her hands to my chest, pressing them against my heart. "I'm not asking you to be perfect. I'm not asking you to never be afraid. I'm asking you to stop carrying everything alone. To trust me with the broken pieces and let me love you the way I should have loved you five years ago."
"What if I hurt you again?"
"You will. And I'll hurt you. That's what happens when two broken people try to build something whole." I looked up at her, everything I felt laid bare on my face. "But I would rather spend the rest of my life being hurt by you than spend another day pretending I don't need you."
She pulled her hands free.
For one terrible moment, I thought she was going to walk away. But she dropped to her knees in front of me.
"I love you,” she whispered. "I have loved you through every empty night and every morning I woke up. I have loved you across five years and three thousand miles and every wall I built to keep you out."
"Calla—"
"And I am so tired." Her voice broke. "I am so tired of being strong. So tired of carrying everything alone. So tired of pretending I don't need you when you're the only thing I've ever needed."
I pulled her into my arms, finally letting my guard down, and breaking through the walls she kept herself in.