In sterile silence of the hospital room pressed in on Annie as she slowly came to. The world around her was blurry and distant, her body aching in a way that felt both familiar and wrong. The usual sounds of a busy ward—the beeping of monitors, the hurried steps of nurses, the hushed conversations of doctors—were absent. A heavy, unsettling quiet filled the space, leaving only the thudding of her heart in her chest.
She lifted her hand to her face, feeling the coolness of the skin, the dampness on her forehead. There was pain in her body, dull and pervasive, but it was not the same kind of pain she had expected. She should have been filled with the overwhelming joy of new life. The cries of a newborn should have filled the room, the sight of her child’s tiny face, the warmth of its body a
