4

Ethan The first thing I felt was light, too bright and too white, pressing against my eyelids like it wanted something from me. The second thing I felt was pain, dull and distant, radiating out from my chest like an echo of whatever had nearly killed me. The third thing I felt, before I even opened my eyes, was her name rising in my throat. "Clara." My voice came out as barely more than a scrape. A nurse's face swam into focus above me, kind eyes, tired smile. "There he is," she said softly. "Welcome back, Mr. Cole. You gave us quite a scare." "Where's Clara?" I tried to sit up and pain lanced through my chest, sharp enough that the nurse's hand found my shoulder and pressed me gently back down. "Easy. You just came out of major surgery. Your body needs time." "Clara Bennett. She was here. She would have been here the whole time, she never leaves, can you—" My words were coming faster than my body could support, and the monitor beside me picked up its rhythm in response. "Can you find her? Please." Something crossed the nurse's face. A flicker of hesitation I might not have caught if I hadn't spent five years learning every version of worry that could cross the face of someone who loved me. This wasn't that. This was something else. Something careful. "I'll check with the front desk," she said, and the way she said it told me she already knew something I didn't. She was gone for twenty minutes. Twenty minutes in which I catalogued every possible explanation, she'd gone to get coffee, she'd gone home to shower, she was asleep in the waiting room and someone needed to wake her. None of the explanations I built for myself were the one that turned out to be true. When the nurse came back, she wasn't alone. A doctor was with her now, and something in the set of his shoulders made my stomach drop before he said a single word. "Mr. Cole. I'm glad to see you're recovering well." He paused, glanced at the nurse, and I understood in that pause that whatever came next was the kind of thing doctors dreaded saying almost as much as patients dreaded hearing. "Miss Bennett isn't here. She hasn't been here in several days." "That's not possible. She wouldn't leave. Not while I—" "She left explicit instructions with the hospital before she stopped visiting," the doctor said gently. "Instructions, and payment. Your surgery, your recovery, all of it has been covered in full. I believe you should know that much. Beyond that, I'm afraid it isn't my place to explain the rest." "The rest of what?" Neither of them answered. The nurse's eyes dropped to the floor, and that told me everything the doctor wouldn't say out loud. The moment they left, I found my phone on the bedside table, the battery nearly dead, and called her number with hands that wouldn't stop shaking. It rang twice and then delivered a message I'd never heard directed at her number before. The number you are trying to reach is no longer in service. I called again. Same result. I tried her email next, some old account she used for school years ago that I still had saved from back when we used to send each other ridiculous memes at two in the morning. Nothing. I asked a nurse to help me find a tablet, and she brought one reluctantly, like she already knew what I would use it to search for. I typed her name into the search bar with fingers that felt like they belonged to someone else. The first result loaded before I'd even finished typing the last letter. Clara Bennett Weds Billionaire Sebastian Ashford in Private Ceremony. I stared at the headline for a long time before I could make myself open the article. Then the photographs loaded, one after another, and each one was a small, precise wound. Clara in white, more beautiful than I had ever seen her, standing beside a man I recognized from magazine covers my old coworkers used to flip through on lunch breaks, joking about lives none of us would ever live. Clara smiling at him. Clara's hand in his. A ring on her finger that cost more than every car I'd ever fixed combined. I scrolled through image after image, searching her face for some sign that she'd been forced, some flicker of the grief I wanted so badly to believe was there, and found nothing but composure. She looked calm. She looked, if anything, at peace. The date on the article was three days after I'd collapsed on my apartment floor. Three days after the ambulance, after the diagnosis, after she'd sat beside my hospital bed and promised me, in the last conversation I remembered clearly, that we were going to be fine. She hadn't waited for me to wake up. She hadn't waited to see if I would survive at all. Whatever conversation had happened between her and her parents, whatever deal had been struck, it had all been decided and executed while I was unconscious, unable to fight for the only thing in my life that had ever felt like it belonged to me. I thought of every promise she'd made me. Every night she'd chosen this apartment over her parents' mansion, every argument she'd had with her family on my behalf, every time she'd told me money meant nothing to her compared to what we had. All of it, apparently, had an expiration date. The date my life stopped being convenient to save. My hand drifted to the ring on my finger, the twin to the one I'd given her, the one I'd shaped myself in the garage on nights when I couldn't sleep, imagining a future I clearly should have known better than to believe in. I stared at it for a long moment, feeling something in my chest harden into something colder than the surgery had left behind. She had chosen a billionaire the moment my life became a liability instead of a promise worth keeping. I pulled the ring from my finger and set it on the bedside table, where it caught the fluorescent light and gave nothing back. "You wanted wealth over me," I said quietly, to no one, to the empty room, to the version of Clara I'd built my whole future around. "Fine. Then you'll learn exactly what it costs to have both, Clara Bennett. I swear to you, I will never forgive you for this."