“Your phone wasn’t on silent, Mr. Carter,” a new, deeper voice interrupted.
Mark whipped his head around. Dr. Naomi Patel was standing at the end of the hall, her white lab coat unbuttoned, her face a mask of exhausted fury. She walked slowly toward him, her footsteps heavy and deliberate. In her hands, she held a thick, manila folder stamped with red ink across the tab: CONFIDENTIAL – LEGAL HOLD / CARTER.
“Dr. Patel,” Mark breathed, grasping at this familiar face like a drowning man clutching a straw. “Thank God. You were there. You performed the surgery. Tell me the babies are okay. Tell me Emily is resting at home. My phone... my phone had technical issues, I swear, I was dealing with a family emergency—”
“A family emergency,” Dr. Patel repeated flatly, stopping just inches from him. The look in her eyes was venomous. “Is that what you call cutting a white chocolate raspberry cake with your mistress while your wife hemorrhaged three liters of blood on an operating table?”
Mark recoiled as if struck. “How—how do you know that?”
“Because while you were ignoring fifty-two calls from this hospital, I was standing over Emily’s open abdomen trying to keep her from bleeding out on my shoes,” Dr. Patel hissed, stepping closer so that only he could hear her. “Because while Baby B’s heart rate flatlined because we had to wait for your legal consent—consent you only gave because Lauren begged you over text—Emily was crying not for her own life, but for the names she had picked out alone. Grace. Lily. Hope.”
“They’re alive,” Mark whispered, tears suddenly stinging his eyes, fueled by pure, unadulterated panic rather than grief. “The babies... they survived. Emily survived. She went home, the nurse just said—”
“She didn’t go home to your house, Mr. Carter,” Dr. Patel interrupted, her voice dropping to a chilling register. She opened the manila folder and pulled out a single, stark sheet of paper—a discharge transfer document. “Emily signed her own discharge papers at 4:15 a.m. on Saturday morning. Barely twelve hours after major abdominal surgery. She refused a wheelchair. She walked out of the sliding glass doors into the freezing rain with nothing more than the clothes she came in and a cardboard box.”