The Heart That Wasn’t Mine, the Life I Never Asked For Chapter 01

The Heart That Wasn’t Mine, the Life I Never Asked For Chapter 01

On my way to the clinic to terminate the pregnancy, someone shoved a survey into my hands.

[What moment in your life would you most want to go back to?]

I thought for a few seconds, then pressed my pen to the paper.

[I’d go back to the day of the Lakeshore Pileup. And stop the doctors from saving me.]

The girl beside me read my answer and sucked in a sharp breath.

“They said only nine people survived that crash. Why would you want them to let you die?”

I pressed my hand to my chest, feeling the transplanted heart beat beneath my ribs, and looked up at the lobby screen above the mall entrance.

It was playing footage of Ethan Shaw dropping a small fortune on a sapphire engagement ring for some film student.

Every woman in that lobby envied her. One smile from her and Chicago’s most ruthless power player had bent to his knees.

None of them knew the baby I was about to terminate was his.

I handed the survey back to the girl and forced a smile.

“I was always someone who should have died.”

That night at the Lakeshore Pileup, the doctors mistook me for Ethan’s sister Vivienne. They cut out her heart and put it inside me.

I’d been living on that heart for three years.

Ethan had been hating me for three years.

It was time, I thought, to give it back.

***

The girl stared at me, mouth slightly open.

She tried twice before she finally spoke.

“That wasn’t your fault.”

“Don’t be so hard on yourself. What’s done is done.”

“You have to look forward, you know?”

After a few more rounds of comfort, she couldn’t help herself.

“Her brother. He didn’t come after you, did he?”

I shook my head with a bitter smile.

Back then, Ethan hadn’t come after me at all. He’d comforted me. Endlessly.

Every night I spiraled into guilt and couldn’t sleep, he’d fly back from Wall Street just to sit beside me.

When my medication made me sick, he’d drive twenty miles at midnight to bring me the shortbread cookies I liked.

I thought Ethan Shaw loved me.

Then came our one-year anniversary. He walked in with another woman.

After they finished in our bed, he looked at me with cold, flat eyes while I sobbed.

“Savannah. If you hadn’t swapped jackets with Vivienne that night, the doctors never would’ve made the mistake. Her heart would still be in her chest.”

“Vivienne was fragile. She cried over a paper cut. Do you have any idea how much pain she was in when she died?”

“Savannah Cole. You will spend the rest of your life paying for what you did to her.”

Ethan’s reckoning came down like a sledgehammer.

After that night, he brought women home constantly and made me watch.

He let them hurt me, again and again.

They locked me in a sauna for three days straight.

Tied weights to my ankles and threw me into a frozen lake.

Three years of this. I was done.

If Ethan hated me that much for taking Vivienne’s heart, fine.

I’d give it back.

Termination paperwork in hand, I walked into the hospital where I’d booked my third consultation for a heart removal surgery.

The doctor saw me and frowned before I even sat down.

“Ms. Cole, I’ve told you before. You’re still pregnant. We cannot perform a heart extraction while you’re carrying a child.”

I didn’t argue. I set the termination form on his desk.

“I’m having the termination today.”

“After that, nothing stands in the way of the extraction.”

“But after we replace it with a mechanical heart, you’ll have one year. One year, Savannah. What’s the point?”

“And the father has rights here. Does he know? Has he consented?”

Would Ethan consent?

The doctor’s question dragged me back to a few days ago.

I’d been rushing to find Ethan, prenatal report in hand, heart pounding with something I hadn’t felt in years.

I stopped when I heard one of his friends ask him: if I were pregnant, would he keep coming for me?

Ethan paused. Then he laughed. The kind of laugh that meant he’d heard the funniest joke of his life.

“Pregnant?”

“Perfect.”

“Savannah owes Vivienne a life. The kid in her stomach can settle that debt.”

“The second she delivers, I’ll cut the baby’s heart out right in front of her—”

His words hit like a blade driving straight into my chest.

I stood there in the hallway, tears sliding down my face, one hand pressed to my stomach.

“The baby doesn’t have a father.”

So it wouldn’t affect the extraction.