Chapter 114: Chapter One Hundred and Twelve – The Hospital
The sirens wailed through the night, cutting sharp arcs of sound across the dark streets, but Zane barely heard any of it. He sat wedged on the narrow bench in the back of the ambulance, knees spread to keep from shaking, hands gripping the metal rail so hard his knuckles were white. Willow lay strapped to the gurney across from him, her body unnaturally still except for the faint rise and fall of her chest beneath the oxygen mask. Two EMTs worked over her with quick, efficient movements that filled the space with clipped phrases he couldn’t fully process.
"Twenty-seven-year-old female, approximately thirty-two, maybe thirty-three weeks pregnant."
"BP is climbing again."
"Signs of preeclampsia, possible abruption."
"Get another line in, no, higher, good."
Zane couldn’t breathe. It felt like someone had carved a hollow into his lungs and left him with nothing but cold air and panic swirling inside. Willow’s face looked too pale beneath the harsh cabin lights, her lashes trembling faintly with some sensation she couldn’t voice, the oxygen mask fogging slightly with each shallow inhale. He reached out once, just once, to touch her hand, but an EMT gently but firmly pushed his arm back to give them room.
He had never felt so useless in his entire life. Every instinct inside him screamed to do something, anything, rip apart the problem with his bare hands if he had to. But there was nothing to fight. Nothing to punch. Nothing to fix. Just machines beeping, blood pressure readings rising, and her limp body on a rolling stretcher that separated him from the only person he wanted to protect.
"Her pressure is still high. 167 over 112. Start magnesium sulfate now."
"IV is running. Fetal heart rate, hold on, check again."
The second EMT moved the Doppler across her abdomen in smooth circles. Zane leaned forward instinctively, like his body was tethered to the sound that hadn’t yet come. When the faint, rapid thump thump thump finally reached the tiny speaker, he nearly broke apart with relief, though it did nothing to slow the shaking in his hands.
"Fetal heartbeat present but irregular. We need to move fast."
The ambulance hit a bump, and Zane shifted to keep from toppling over. His muscles ached from how tightly he was gripping the bench. Sweat collected at the back of his neck, cool from fear rather than heat, and every cell in his body seemed locked on the rise and fall of Willow’s chest as if willing each breath to continue. He tried to synchronize his own breathing with hers, counting the shallow movements, terrified that if he blinked wrong she would stop. The interior lights cast a sharp glow across her skin, washing her in a sterile brightness that made the paleness of her cheeks even more pronounced. He watched one of her fingers twitch beneath the strap and felt a bolt of desperate hope shoot through him, only for the EMT to murmur that it was just a reflex.
One EMT lifted Willow’s eyelid with a thumb. "She’s drifting. Stay with us, sweetheart."
Another adjusted her oxygen. "BP is still climbing. Get her ready for immediate OB assessment the moment we hit the bay."
Zane swallowed hard, his voice barely scraping out. "Is she... Is she going to be okay?"
The EMT didn’t promise anything. They never did. He just gave a short, focused answer without looking up from the monitors. "We’re doing everything we can for her. She needs a hospital now."
The words landed like a shard in his chest. He nodded, even though it didn’t help, even though nothing helped. He wished he could trade places with her. He wished the pain, the bleeding, the contractions, any of it, were his instead. Instead, all he could do was sit motionless, suspended between disbelief and terror, watching the woman he loved fight for breath while strangers fought for her life. He kept bracing himself each time the ambulance swayed, half afraid that the motion alone might hurt her further. Her hair was spread against the pillow in dark waves, sticking slightly to her forehead where sweat had collected, and he wanted nothing more than to brush it back, to soothe her, to tell her she wasn’t alone.
The ambulance screeched into the emergency entrance, red lights bouncing across the glossy sliding doors as they burst open. The EMTs unlocked the gurney with a practiced click and pulled her out with swift, coordinated strength. Zane jumped out immediately, nearly tripping as he tried to keep up. The cold night air hit him like a slap, but he barely felt it. He only saw Willow’s dark hair fanned over the pillow, the oxygen tube bobbing lightly as the gurney barrelled toward the entrance. The wheels clattered loudly over the metal threshold, an awful echo that hammered through his skull.
"Make way!" one EMT shouted as they rushed her through the double doors. "OB emergency incoming, suspected abruption, severe preeclampsia, unconscious, thirty-two-week pregnancy, prep a room!"
Hospital staff parted in a flurry, nurses, aides, two doctors, murmuring things he couldn’t catch. He started to follow them through the swinging doors of the restricted hallway, but a security guard stopped him with a firm arm across his chest.
"Sir, you can’t go back there."
"No, wait, I’m with her," he said, breathless, trying to push forward.
"You can’t go in right now. They need space to work." The guard’s tone was not unkind, only inflexible. Zane felt pressure building behind his ribs, his own breathing bordering on frantic.
Zane stood frozen, helpless, feet rooted as Willow disappeared behind doors that swung shut in his face. He felt his chest cave inward. Something inside him broke so quietly it felt like the absence of a sound. He stood there long enough for the automatic doors to hiss open and closed twice beside him, the world around him moving as if in slow, muffled waves. A nurse pushed by with a tray, a man coughed somewhere behind him, and none of it registered.
A nurse approached with a clipboard. "Are you her partner? We need someone to fill out her intake. We need her medical information."
He opened his mouth and realized he didn’t even know what to say.
He opened his mouth, but no words came out at first. The question hung in the air between them, simple on the surface yet impossibly complicated the moment he tried to answer it. Was he her partner? The word itself felt too large, too official, pressing against truths he could not quite claim. He wasn’t her husband. He wasn’t her boyfriend. He wasn’t the father. He wasn’t even supposed to be here. Yet he was the one who had been holding her when she collapsed, the one who had seen the blood spreading across the grass, the one whose name she had whispered when the pain had stolen the strength from her voice. The memory of that moment tightened something deep in his chest, grounding him in a reality that paperwork and labels suddenly felt too small to define.
"Yes," he said finally, voice thick. "I’m... I’m here for her."
"Then you need to fill these out."
She handed him forms with too many lines and too many questions he suddenly felt too stupid to answer. He sat down hard in the nearest chair and dug through her bag with trembling hands. Her purse felt foreign in his grip, too intimate to be handled by someone who didn’t even know her middle name, and yet he was the only one here for her now. The bag smelled faintly of her perfume, soft and familiar, and the scent alone nearly undid him.
He opened her wallet.
Her driver’s license peeked up at him.
WILLOW ROSE HALE
O+
Donor: Yes
Emergency Contact: Victor Soren
Rose.
He hadn’t known.
He’d never asked.
He never thought to.
He had memorized her laugh, her scent, the way she held a pen when she was thinking, the tremor in her voice when she was scared, yet he hadn’t known her middle name.
His chest tightened painfully as he scribbled her information into the forms with a pen that slipped between his fingers twice. His handwriting was uneven. His breathing worse. He filled in her age, her due date, her blood type, her employer, her address, all details that made her feel both intimately known and impossibly far away. Each line he wrote made him feel simultaneously closer to her and completely out of her world, a spectator trying to piece together a life he only saw in fragments.
"Is her husband on the way?" the nurse asked.
He froze, gripping the pen until it bent. "I... don’t know."
"Can you call him?"
Zane stared at the emergency contact line.
Victor Hale.
Of course.
He swallowed the jagged lump in his throat. "I’ll call."
The nurse disappeared, and he sat there with Willow’s wallet open in his lap, staring at the tiny photograph of her smiling up at him, frozen in time, looking so alive it made his eyes burn. The noise of the ER swelled and receded around him, a distant phone ringing, the squeak of shoes, the hum of overhead announcements, but all he could hear was his own heartbeat and the memory of hers echoing faintly in that ambulance speaker.
He had never felt so useless.
So helpless.
So terrified.
And for the first time since he’d met her, he realized how little he actually knew and how much she meant to him anyway.
