24. Corey
— ? —
Corey
The ambulance ride is the longest fifteen minutes of my life.
Willow is strapped to a gurney, pale and terrified, while paramedics call out terms I don’t understand, placental abruption, fetal distress, emergency cesarean, maternal hemorrhage.
I hold her hand and tell her it’s going to be okay, and I don’t know if I’m lying or not.
I don’t know anything except that my wife is bleeding and my daughter might be dying and there’s nothing I can do but hold on and pray to a god I’ve never believed in.
“Stay with me,” I tell her. “Stay with me, Willow. Don’t you dare leave me.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” she manages, but her voice is weak, thready, nothing like the fierce woman who faced down my mother an hour ago. “I promised, remember? In this together.”
“In this together. Always.”
At the hospital, they try to separate us. A nurse with kind eyes and a calm voice tells me I need to wait outside while they prep her for surgery.
“No.” Willow’s voice is weak but fierce. “He stays. He’s my husband. He stays with me.”
They let me stay. They put me in scrubs and a mask and park me by her head while they work behind a blue curtain, and I hold her hand and tell her I love her and try not to think about all the machines beeping and all the voices calling out numbers that mean nothing to me and everything to the people trying to save her life.
“If something happens to me…” she starts.
“Nothing is going to happen to you.”
“But if it does…”
“It won’t.”
“Corey.” She squeezes my hand, hard, with more strength than I thought she had left. “Please. I need to say this. Let me say this.”
I force myself to look at her, really look, even though everything in me is screaming to run, to hide, to not hear whatever she’s about to say. Her face is pale, almost gray, and there’s fear in her eyes, but underneath it there’s another thing entirely, one that looks like peace.
“If something happens to me,” she says, “I want you to know that I forgive you. For everything. The jealousy, the accusations, all of it. I forgave you months ago, really. I was just too scared to say it out loud.”
“Willow…”
“You’re not that man anymore. You’re the man I fell in love with. The man I always knew you could be. And I’m so proud of you. So proud of how hard you’ve worked to change.”
“Please stop talking like you’re going to die.” My voice breaks. “You’re not going to die. I won’t let you.”
“Take care of our baby.” She’s crying now, tears sliding down her temples into her hair.
“Be the father I know you can be. And don’t, don’t let what happened with your mother make you afraid to love.
You have so much love to give, Corey. I’ve seen it.
I’ve felt it. Our baby is going to be so lucky to have you. ”
“She’s going to have both of us,” I say fiercely. “Because you’re going to be fine. You’re going to come through this, and we’re going to take her home together, and we’re going to spend the next fifty years fighting about whose turn it is to change diapers. Do you hear me? This is not the end.”
A doctor appears at my shoulder. “Mr. Knightley, we’re about to begin. We need you to…”
“Sir.” Another voice, sharper. A different doctor, her face grim. “We need a decision. If it comes down to it, mother or child, who do we prioritize?”
The world stops.
I look at Willow. She’s looking at me, and I can see the answer she wants to give, the selfless, maternal answer that would put the baby first. The answer every mother is supposed to give.
But she doesn’t say it. She just waits, letting me choose.
“My wife.” The words come out without hesitation, without doubt. “Save my wife.”
Willow’s eyes go wide. “Corey…”
“I love our baby. I already love our baby more than I knew I could love anything. But I can’t lose you. I won’t survive losing you. So save my wife. Please.” My voice cracks. “Save my wife.”
The doctor nods, says something I don’t hear, and then everything becomes chaos, beeping machines and shouted orders and hands pulling me away from Willow’s bedside.
“I love you,” I call to her as they wheel her through the double doors. “I love you, Willow. Come back to me.”
The doors swing shut.
A nurse stops me before I can follow her through them.
She presses a small plastic bag into my hand, the things they couldn’t take into the OR with her, her earrings, and the delicate gold chain she wears against her heart, the thin gold band still threaded onto it.
I close my fingers around it and don’t let go.
I’m alone in the corridor, still in my surgical scrubs, when a voice I haven’t heard in five years cuts through the silence.
“Well. This is quite the scene.”
I turn.
Vivian Ashworth stands at the end of the hallway, immaculate as always in cream silk and pearls, her face arranged in an expression of polite concern that doesn’t reach her eyes. Behind her, a hospital administrator is wringing his hands.
“Mrs. Ashworth is listed as an emergency contact on an old file, from before Mrs. Knightley married,” he says apologetically. “It’s still flagged in the legacy system, and an automated alert went out the moment her name was entered tonight. It should have been updated years ago, I’m sorry…”
“Then your records are five years out of date. I’m her husband. I’m her emergency contact.”
“I can check with…”
“Don’t bother.” I turn my back on the administrator, facing Vivian directly. “What are you doing here?”
“I’m here for my daughter.” She moves closer, her heels clicking against the linoleum. “I heard there was an emergency. Naturally I came as quickly as I could.”
“Naturally.” The word tastes like poison. “After five years of nothing. After cutting her off and letting her think she was dead to you. You show up now, when she’s fighting for her life, like you have any right to be here.”
“I have every right. She’s my blood. My only child.” Vivian’s voice sharpens. “And from what I understand, this pregnancy has been complicated from the start. Perhaps if she hadn’t been under so much stress, stress caused by her failing marriage…”
“Don’t you dare.” I step toward her, and something in my face makes her actually flinch.
“Don’t you dare try to blame this on me.
Don’t you dare pretend you give a damn about her well-being when you’ve spent five years punishing her for choosing love over your approval.
You don’t get to rewrite history just because it suits your narrative. ”
“I was trying to protect her…”
“You were trying to control her. There’s a difference.
And you failed. She chose me. She chose our life together.
And even after I nearly destroyed it, even after I did exactly what you warned her I would do, she chose me again.
Because that’s who she is. She fights for the people she loves, even when they don’t deserve it. ”
“Unlike you.” Vivian’s composure cracks, just slightly. “You accused her of infidelity. You questioned the paternity of your own child. You proved everything I ever said about you.”
“Yes. I did. And then I spent six months becoming someone better. Someone worthy of her. Someone who would never hurt her like that again.” I hold her gaze, refusing to flinch. “What have you done in the last five years, Vivian? Besides nurse your grudge and wait for her to come crawling back?”
Before she can answer, the double doors swing open.
A nurse appears, her face grave.
“Mr. Knightley? There’s been a complication. We need you to…”
But I’m already moving, already pushing past her, already running toward whatever awaits me on the other side of those doors.
Behind me, I hear Vivian’s voice, sharp and commanding: “I demand to see my daughter. I’m her family…”
And then Willow’s voice, weak but unmistakable, cutting through everything:
“He’s my husband. He stays.”
I reach her bedside just as she turns her head toward the doorway, toward the mother she hasn’t seen in five years.
There are tubes everywhere, in her arms, her nose, machines tracking her vitals with their steady electronic beeping.
But her eyes are clear. Fierce. The eyes of the woman who faced down Dena on our doorstep.
“Mother.” Her voice is barely a whisper, but it carries. “Go home.”
“Willow, darling…”
“I said go home.” She reaches for my hand, squeezes it with what little strength she has left. “Corey is my family now. Corey and our daughter. You made your choice five years ago when you told me to choose between you and him. I made mine. We both have to live with that.”
Vivian’s face goes through something complicated, shock, hurt, fury, all of it flickering across her features before settling into the cold mask I remember from our wedding day.
“You’ll regret this,” she says quietly. “When he hurts you again, because he will hurt you again, Willow, men like him always do, don’t come crying to me.”
“I won’t.” Willow’s voice is fading, exhaustion pulling at her, but she forces the words out anyway. “I haven’t needed you in five years. I don’t need you now.”
Vivian turns and walks away, her heels clicking against the floor, her back straight and her head high.
She doesn’t look back.
A nurse appears at my elbow. “Mr. Knightley, we need to take her back into surgery. There was some additional bleeding…”
“Go.” Willow squeezes my hand one more time. “I’ll be okay. They got her out. She’s safe. Now let them take care of me. Go find our daughter. I’ll see you both when it’s over.”
“I love you.”
“I know.” She smiles, weak but real. “I love you too. Now go be a nervous wreck in the waiting room like a normal first-time father.”
They wheel her away.
I sink into a plastic chair and put my head in my hands and wait.
Hours pass. Or minutes. I can’t tell anymore.
The clock on the wall moves in increments that don’t make sense, sometimes fast, sometimes so slow I wonder if time has stopped altogether.
I text Glenn. I text Mrs. Potts. I pace the corridor and drink terrible coffee and try not to imagine all the things that could be going wrong behind those doors.
Then: a cry. Small, furious, impossibly alive.
A nurse appears in the doorway, her face transformed by a smile.
“Mr. Knightley? Would you like to meet your daughter?”