“Amelia, I know I failed you. I know. I have replayed it again and again. When the monitor flatlined, I thought…” He swallowed. “I thought I had killed you.”
My eyes stung, but I refused to look away.
“Did you change my chart?”
He froze.
There it was.
Not confession.
Not denial.
The pause between the two.
“I entered a note,” he said at last. “Because you had said earlier in the pregnancy that you wanted to avoid surgery unless absolutely necessary.”
“That was not refusal.”
“I know.”
“Then why?”
His hands trembled.
“Because Sophie said you would ruin me.”
Elena’s head turned sharply.
I felt a chill move through me.
Cameron looked suddenly older.
“She said you’d file a complaint. That you’d tell people I forced you into a C-section because I didn’t trust you to deliver naturally. She said you had already started documenting things against me.”
I stared at him, trying to connect the man in front of me to the one I had married.
“And you believed her?”
His answer came too softly.
“I didn’t know what to believe.”
The pain in my abdomen pulsed with my heartbeat.
“You believed enough to protect yourself.”
His eyes filled.
“I was wrong.”
“Yes.”
It was such a small word for something so enormous.
Cameron looked toward the bassinet that wasn’t there. “Can I see him?”
Something inside me recoiled.
Not forever, perhaps. Not legally. Not even fairly.
But in that moment, the thought of him holding the child I had begged him to protect while he looked through me was unbearable.
“Not now.”
