I Lost Our Baby While He Danced With Her Chapter 09

I Lost Our Baby While He Danced With Her Chapter 09

I didn’t go back to the hotel that night until late, and when I did, there were seventeen missed calls from Grant and one Dicemail I deleted without listening to. Whatever was in it belonged to a conversation we should have had three months go, in a marriage that no longer existed.

At 5 a.m., I scrubbed in.

Whatever else Grant Caldwell was, he was professional. He stood across the table from me for eleven hours as my

econd, and he was flawless-anticipating, retracting, silent. Only his eyes were wrong. They kept finding me over the

ask, the way you check a wound you’re not allowed to touch.

The Vance heart was a disaster zone, fibrosis like concrete, and twice we nearly lost him on the table. At hour nine, when

le graft finally took and the rhythm steadied into something sustainable, the whole OR exhaled at once.

‘Good work, everyone,” I said, stepping back. “Dr. Caldwell will close.”

In the scrub room afterward, peeling off gloves, I caught my reflection. Hollow-eyed, hair flattened with sweat, hands

teady. The best surgeon in two states had spent five years convincing me I was lucky to carry his medication.

The recovery went clean. Vance Senior would live to face his lawsuits-and there would be lawsuits. The criminal xposure, the civil suits from the workers’ families, the regulatory storm-none of that was my problem. I’d been hired for a

eart, not a reputation.

Bree was waiting in the family lounge when I came to deliver the update. The moment I finished the words stable

ondition, she burst into tears of relief-and then, with the emotional whiplash of a woman who had never once been told

o, she rounded on me.

“You took your time in there on purpose!” Her voice rang off the walls. “Eleven hours! You wanted him to die so you could

unish Grant! You can’t stand that he loves me-you bitter, cruel old hag-”

‘Enough, Bree.” Grant’s voice cracked through the room like bone breaking. He had never used that tone on her. Possibly

n anyone. “She just spent eleven hours saving your father’s life after you spent six months destroying it. Your mouth tarted this disaster. Do you even care about your father, or just about the camera angle?”

Bree’s face went white, then blotchy red. No one had ever scolded her in her life, and the first time was in public, from him,

front of me. She threw her thousand-dollar bag at his chest and fled in tears.

He didn’t follow her.

That, I thought distantly, was the most honest thing he’d done in years.

I turned to leave. “Sienna. Wait.”

I looked at him and lifted my chin: get to the point.

He’d lost weight this week. The collar of his shirt sat loose. He organized his words several times-Grant Caldwell, drafting md redrafting a sentence like a first-year resident.

“I opened the box,” he finally said.

I said nothing.

“There was a date on the sonogram.” His voice was scraped raw. “You’d known for a month. A month of me-” He stopped. “The mall. The mall was during that month. made you cry in public while you were carrying-”

“Yes,” I said simply.

He flinched like I’d struck him. I hadn’t raised my voice. I’d just stopped cushioning his falls, and it turned out the ground vas very hard.

“Is it really impossible for us?” he asked. “Tell me what to do. I’ll do anything. I’ll fire the whole PR team, I’ll make a ¡tatement, I’ll-

“Do you hear yourself?” I let out a soft laugh. “Even your grief comes with an action plan and a press strategy.”

“Then tell me what you want.”

“I want what I asked for,” I said. “Which you already gave me. Your signature.”

“Bree isn’t the reason,” I continued, because he deserved the accuracy if nothing else. “She’s a trigger. Before she existed, ou skipped three anniversaries and called me a nanny for waiting up. You haven’t lost the ability to love, Grant. I watched ‘ou wait in the rain for her. You just never loved me. And I spent five years and one child learning the difference.”

He stood there in the hallway of his own empire, and for the first time since I’d known him, Grant Caldwell had no rebuttal,

10 lecture, no exit strategy.

My phone buzzed. Nolan. Two words: Trial run’s over. Come home.

Home. The word didn’t hurt anymore.

But Bree Vance was not finished with me. And what she did next set the whole internet on fire-with both of us in it.