Chapter 2 - What Isabel Left Behind
He nodded slowly, working to lay out the whole tangled sequence in some kind of order. Isabel had been seven months pregnant when her husband packed a bag and walked out on her without warning. She had no family left nearby — her mother had passed the year before, her father long gone since she was a teenager.
Early that morning, she'd gone into premature labor alone in her apartment. She'd tried to drive herself to the hospital, but the contractions forced her to pull into a gas station and call an ambulance instead. She delivered a six-pound baby girl shortly after arriving at St. Catherine's.
The baby was healthy. Isabel wasn't. Severe postpartum bleeding, the kind doctors couldn't get ahead of. Her condition fell apart within hours. By midmorning it was clear she wasn't going to survive the afternoon.
"How did the hospital even know to call you?" I asked, trying to keep up with the shape of this.
"They didn't reach out to me first," Ethan said, leaning back against the corridor wall.
Right then, a nurse stepped out of the room with a chart pressed to her chest. "Are you his wife?" she asked gently, glancing between us.
"Yes," I said, moving closer to Ethan.
"When Isabel was slipping, we asked if there was anyone we could contact for her," the nurse said softly. "She was barely conscious. But she kept repeating one name, over and over."
"She said his name?" I asked, pointing at my husband.
"She said Ethan's full name, until she couldn't speak anymore," the nurse confirmed. "Social services checked her belongings and found an old emergency contact card in her wallet with his information."
"They called my cell about an hour ago," Ethan said quietly.
"And you came straight here."
"Of course I came straight here."
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"Did you get to see her? Before—"
He shook his head. "No. She was already gone by the time I got to the parking lot."
