The first night after I was transferred to a new hospital for a shift, I ran into Carina Harding, the wife who had claimed she was away on a business trip.

She was lying on a gurney outside the delivery room, visibly pregnant, blood pooling beneath her.

The man kneeling beside her seized my hand in a grip so tight it hurt, his voice raw with desperation.

"Doctor, please, you have to save her!"

A nurse held out the surgical consent form in front of him.

"We need a family member's signature before the procedure. What's your relationship to the patient?"

The man took the pen. Both his hands were shaking as he signed.

"She's my wife."

The words knocked the air out of my chest. What flashed through my mind was the scene from a year ago when Carina had smiled and handed me our marriage certificate.

"Donald Simmons, from today on, we're officially husband and wife."

He must have noticed me freeze, because the man looked up through bloodshot eyes, a flicker of confusion crossing his face.

I ducked my head quickly, adjusting the mask over the bridge of my nose to hide my expression, and turned to push open the operating room doors.

"We'll do everything we can for the patient."

But whatever had existed between Carina and me, I was certain it had just been pronounced dead.

……

After a round of emergency intervention, Carina's condition stabilized. The tension in the operating room eased.

A colleague beside me lowered her voice to gossip.

"I heard these two got a little too... vigorous, and that's what caused all this."

"The woman's practically at her due date and her husband still can't keep his hands off her. Young people these days really do risk their lives for love..."

My hands slowed for a few seconds. What surfaced in my mind was the day Carina had proposed to me, her eyes bright, as if she were ready to pluck a star from the sky and place it in my palm.

"Donald, marry me. For the rest of my life, you'll be the only man I ever touch. I swear it."

Then came our wedding night, and she picked up every piece of clothing I had taken off, putting them back on me one by one. Her face was full of anguish and conflict.

"I'm sorry, Donald."

"I made a vow at my mother's grave to observe three years of mourning for her. This is the third year. Just wait a little longer for me."

I believed her. And the payoff for that belief was the child I was now fighting to deliver, a child that was nearly ready to enter the world.

The corner of my mouth twisted into something bitter.

So the real reason she never touched me wasn't devotion to tradition. It was simply that she never loved me at all.

The surgery wrapped up smoothly. I held the newborn in my arms.

She barely weighed anything, yet the weight on my chest was crushing.

When I pulled the operating room door open, the man waiting outside shot to his feet and rushed over.

His eyes were threaded with red, worry and panic written across every line of his face.

"How's Carina?"

I looked at the man in front of me and recalled the name he had scrawled on the consent form. Percy Henson.

A complete stranger. Carina had never once mentioned him to me.

I placed the baby in his arms and offered my congratulations.

"Mother and daughter are both safe. The surgery went well."

The tension drained visibly from Percy's face, replaced by a gratitude so earnest it stung, directed at a man he didn't know was her actual husband.

He opened his mouth to say something more, but Carina's bed was already being wheeled out from behind me.

"Percy..."

She lay on the bed, utterly spent, pale as paper.

Percy shoved past me and hurried to her side.

Carina stroked the baby with one hand and laced her fingers through Percy's with the other. When she spoke, her voice carried a tenderness I had never once heard directed at me.

"Percy, our baby looks so much like you."

"When she grows up, she's going to be just as handsome as her daddy."

A happy little family of three, picture-perfect and glowing. The sight burned behind my eyes like acid.

I clenched my fists so hard my fingernails dug crescents into my palms, the tips turning white before I could wrestle back a shred of composure.

Carina had just come out of surgery, and I'd only just been transferred to this hospital.

This wasn't the time or place to rip the veil off.

Once she'd recovered a bit of strength, her gaze drifted to me.

"Thank you so much, Doctor. I didn't catch your name?"

Behind the surgical cap and mask, Carina didn't recognize me.

I stared into her eyes, searching for even a flicker of guilt.

"Simmons. Dr. Simmons."

But Percy reclaimed her attention almost instantly, and she didn't spare me another glance.

I'd barely made it back to the on-call room when my phone buzzed in my pocket.

I swiped to answer. Carina's voice poured through the speaker.

"Donald, something urgent came up at the office. I probably won't be able to make it home for a while."

My chest was a furnace of rage and questions I wanted to hurl at her.

But the words piled up behind my teeth and died there. The devastation had hollowed me out so completely I couldn't even summon the will to speak.

She mistook my silence for sulking and kept talking, her tone shifting to something coaxing.

"Be good, okay? Once things settle down here, I promise I'll clear my schedule so we can finally take that honeymoon trip..."

"Carina..."

Before she could finish, Percy's voice calling her name and the wail of a newborn erupted on her end of the line, one after the other.

"I have to go!"

She fumbled to hang up.

Too much had happened in a single day.

The sheer absurdity of it all churned through my stomach, and I barely made it to the bathroom before I was doubled over the toilet, retching until the edges of my vision went dark.

Half-conscious, I managed to dial a number.

"Have the marriage certificate from the study cabinet sent to me."

"And tell my father that Carina's been having an affair. I want him to pull every cent of funding from her company. Effective immediately."

According to the schedule, the next round of patient checks was mine.

I forced myself upright and grabbed the chart.

Standing at the doorway, I looked through the glass. Carina and Percy were squeezed together on the narrow hospital bed.

She was curled into his arms, one hand patting his back in a slow, absent rhythm, dark circles bruised beneath her eyes from a sleepless night.

Even though every last thread of feeling had already been severed, the bitterness still rose in my throat, impossible to swallow back down.

My knock made Carina's eyes snap open.

I pulled my mask into place and pushed through the door.

It was a hospital room, but someone had made it warm. Homey, even.

The table overflowed with supplies for mother and baby, everything from nursing pillows to tiny socks, every size accounted for.

Every single item had come from my personal recommendations.

The night before I left for this transfer, Carina had shaken me awake in the middle of the night.

"Donald, you're an OB-GYN. Can you tell me everything someone needs to prepare for having a baby?"

I'd squinted at her, half-asleep and confused.

"Why are you asking about this all of a sudden?"

She stammered something about a coworker whose baby was almost due, said the woman had begged her to ask me.

I'd just come off a thirty-six-hour shift. My brain was barely functioning.

But then Carina sat up, flipped on every light in the apartment, and dragged me out of bed.

"Donald, write it all down. Now."

She shoved a pen into my hand, then pinched the soft skin on the inside of my arm and twisted. Hard.

The searing pain jolted me fully awake.

I worked on that list until dawn bled through the windows.

Before she left, Carina tucked it carefully into the inner pocket of her jacket, handling it like something precious. She turned and walked out without so much as a thank you.

I pressed down the emotions churning behind my eyes and walked to the bedside for the routine checkup.

"How are you feeling today?"

Percy held Carina's hand, his voice soft and warm.

"She's feeling much better now. Yesterday was so touch-and-go, we really owe it all to you, Dr. Simmons. I haven't even had the chance to thank you properly."

"The moment I woke up, I called the factory to rush a shame banner for you. I hope you won't think it's too much."

I smiled, but my gaze had already drifted to their clasped hands.

On Carina's previously bare ring finger sat a ring with the same unusual design as the one on Percy's hand.

Noticing where I was looking, Percy twisted the ring on his finger and explained, his tone brimming with pride.

"My wife designed these herself. Only pair in the world."

"A little ugly, sure, but I love them."

I dropped my gaze fast, burying the storm rising behind my eyes.

The day after our wedding, Carina had taken off the ring I'd had a master jeweler custom-make for her.

I watched her seal it in its box and shove it into the deepest corner of the drawer, where it never saw daylight again.

"Why won't you wear it?"

She'd frowned and shaken her head.

"It's too expensive. If I lost it, what a waste that would be."

I said nothing more. I just quietly slipped off my own ring and tossed it onto the nightstand.

At home, Carina's ring finger had always been bare.

Now it wore a band that never came off.

So in front of me, she hadn't even bothered to pretend.

The baby slept peacefully in the bassinet nearby. Even at this age, traces of Carina were already visible in the child's features.

As the infant shifted, a jade pendant slid out from beneath the collar of the onesie.

The stone was luminous, its quality unmistakable at a glance.

The raw gemstone that had been cut open as a lucky prize at our wedding had been carved into an ordinary jade pendant and hung around the neck of Carina's illegitimate child.

My chest felt hollow. No anger, no grief. Whatever had once lived there, I'd already carved it out myself.

Percy's wheedling voice rose behind me.

"Babe, I'll go grab you some breakfast. You stay here and rest."

Carina looked at him, worry in her eyes.

"You don't know your way around here. Let someone else go."

Percy waved her off and glanced at me.

"Relax. Dr. Simmons is right here. He can show me the way."

Only after I nodded did Carina settle back with a reassured look.

The door opened and closed. Percy and I walked side by side down the corridor.

I let out a quiet breath, a sliver of mockery tucked into the corner of my mouth.

"You and Ms. Harding seem really close."

Percy smiled, eyes full of contentment.

"Carina and I both came from small towns. When it's just the two of you out in the world, you learn to lean on each other."

"Luckily she's driven. Built her own company from the ground up through sheer hard work."

"If it weren't for that one investor giving her such a hard time, she'd probably be one of the top names in the industry by now."

I raised an eyebrow. A slow burn of anger lit somewhere behind my ribs.

Carina's company, from incorporation to every round of funding, had been shepherded step by step by my father.

Her biggest investor was also my father.

She'd refused a position at Simmons Group, claiming she wanted to build something with her own hands and give me a comfortable life.

But her business instincts were mediocre at best. The company had been hemorrhaging money for two years, and my father had been quietly covering the losses behind the scenes, all for my sake.

Yet in her version of events, my father was the difficult investor making her life miserable.

A wolf you could feed forever and never tame.