The hospital corridors had become Mert's narrowest prison. A week after the funeral, while the mourning had not yet moved out of the house, Selin's cry in the small hours of the morning cut through the mansion's silence like a blade. Now Mert was pacing the gleaming floor of the maternity unit, up and down, up and down. The premature birth risk. Selin was still in her seventh month. The accumulated weight of the grief, the sleepless nights, and that unending, unresolvable tension had finally pushed Selin's body past its limit. A Statue in the Corridor Mert stood beneath the red light of the operating theatre. He wore only a black sweater and trousers. His eyes had turned to blood but his body held itself upright the way it always did — that supernatural composure that was both his prote

