CHAPTER 4:Too Late
949 Words
The lobby of Hart Private Medical Center looked more like a five-star hotel than a hospital, all soft lighting and hushed marble, and Damien crossed it in six long strides before a security officer stepped smoothly into his path.
"I'm here for Amelia Hayes," Damien said. "My wife."
Something flickered across the officer's face — recognition, maybe, or the particular caution of someone who'd been given very specific instructions. "I'll need to confirm that with the family," he said, already reaching for his radio.
"The family," Damien repeated. "She doesn't have family. She's an orphan, she—"
"Ms. Hayes was discharged this morning," the officer said, cutting through Damien's confusion with clipped efficiency. "She's no longer on the premises."
"Discharged to where?"
The officer's expression made it clear he wasn't going to answer that question, no matter how many times Damien asked it, and asking louder didn't help either. It took the better part of an hour, a call to a doctor Damien vaguely recognized from a fundraising gala years ago, and something that came uncomfortably close to begging, before he finally got a nurse willing to speak to him at all — a young woman who looked at him with an expression he didn't like, something between sympathy and distaste.
"She was in stable condition when she left," the nurse said carefully. "Considering everything."
"Considering what."
The nurse hesitated, glancing toward the door as though checking whether anyone senior might walk in and stop her. "I probably shouldn't be the one to tell you this."
"Please." The word came out cracked, unfamiliar in his own mouth. Damien Blackwood did not beg. He had built an empire on never needing to. "I need to know what happened to her."
The nurse's face softened, just slightly. "She lost the baby," she said. "I'm sorry. The trauma from the accident — there wasn't anything anyone could have done. She was already several weeks along."
The lobby seemed to tilt around him.
He had been so sure. So absolutely, arrogantly sure that Amelia had invented a pregnancy to manipulate him into staying, that he had barely let himself consider the alternative, not even for a second, not even when some small unquiet part of him had flickered with doubt the moment she said the words. He had thrown papers at a pregnant woman and told her, in essence, that he thought she was a liar and a stranger both. And then he had let her walk out into the night alone, into the path of a car, carrying a truth he had refused to believe.
He didn't remember leaving the hospital. He found himself sitting in the back of his car outside his own building an unknown amount of time later, the ring still in his coat pocket, his driver watching him carefully in the rearview mirror and saying nothing.
Back at the penthouse, Sophia was waiting with dinner set out on the table, candles lit, a bottle of wine already breathing — a small, hopeful tableau of the life she'd apparently decided they would build together now that the obstacle was finally, conveniently gone.
She read his face the moment he walked in and her smile faded into something more careful. "What happened?"
"She was pregnant," Damien said. "She really was pregnant, Sophia. And she lost the baby. Because of the accident. Because of that night."
Sophia's expression did something small and complicated — a flicker, there and then smoothed away so fast that if Damien hadn't been watching closely, he might have missed it entirely. It wasn't grief. It wasn't even surprise.
It looked, for one unguarded instant, like relief.
He didn't understand it yet, not fully — some tangled, unformed suspicion at the edge of his mind that he wasn't ready to examine too closely, not tonight, not with grief and guilt already threatening to swallow him whole. But he filed the look away all the same, the way a man files away a detail his instincts insist matters even when his heart is too busy breaking to ask why.
He sat down heavily at the table she'd set, and didn't touch the wine.
Sophia tried, for a while, to salvage the evening — refilling his glass he wouldn't drink from, talking about a trip she thought they should take, somewhere far away where he could clear his head. He heard her voice the way a person hears rain against a window, present but unreachable, none of it landing anywhere that mattered.
"Damien." She finally reached across the table and covered his hand with hers. "This isn't your fault. You made the decision you had to make with the information you had. No one could have known—"
"I threw papers at her," Damien said, very quietly, not looking up. "I didn't ask her a single question. I didn't give her a chance to explain anything, because some part of me had already decided, before she even opened her mouth, that I wanted to believe the worst of her." He finally raised his eyes to Sophia's face, and something in his expression made her hand go still against his. "How did you get that report, Sophia? The one about her seeing someone else at the clinic. Where exactly did it come from?"
"I told you. A contact," Sophia said, too quickly, and Damien noticed it even through the fog of his own grief — noticed, and filed away, though he didn't yet have the strength to follow the thought any further that night.
"What have I done," he whispered, to no one, to the empty air, to a wife who was
no longer his wife at all.
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