When Dominic survived the surgery, he fell apart. Helena was gone, and he saw no reason to keep living. I stayed beside him then, even as I grieved my own loss—knowing the heart beating inside him once belonged to the man I loved.
It was during that broken time that Dominic proposed to me.
I refused. I wasn’t ready. I thought living together would be enough.
Everyone hated my decision.
My parents accused him of manipulating me. Adrian’s parents looked at me as if I had committed an unforgivable sin. “That heart does not make him Adrian,” his mother told me through tears.
But I stayed anyway.
Because I wanted to believe that something good could grow from all that pain.
Now, with Helena back, I understood the truth.
There was no place for me.
I remained on the cruise, unmoving, while laughter and music echoed around me. I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t breathe. I drifted to the deck, staring at the black sea beneath a sky heavy with storm clouds.
“Where am I supposed to go?” I whispered.
Rain began to fall. People scattered. I stayed.
Thunder cracked. The ship lurched violently. Screams followed.
A sudden impact threw me backward. Another wave surged.
I grabbed the railing—but my hands slipped.
And the ocean swallowed me.
Then everything went dark.
At first, there was emptiness.
I couldn’t feel the hospital bed beneath me. I couldn’t sense the weight of my arms or legs. Even the burning pain that should have filled my lungs—lungs that had swallowed seawater instead of air—was absent. My body lay motionless, hollow, as if abandoned. Yet my mind floated somewhere in between, neither fully asleep nor awake, drifting in a fog of half-awareness.
That was when voices seeped through the darkness.
“Sir, we can’t take any more blood.” The doctor’s voice trembled with urgency. “She nearly drowned. Her lungs were flooded. Her body is already failing. If we continue, she won’t survive—especially when she’s carrying your child.”
Pregnant?
The word echoed violently in my head, snapping something awake inside me. No. That couldn’t be right. I had never suspected it—not once. My body had always been unpredictable, my cycle unreliable. And Dominic and I were careful. Always. Protection. Precautions. I never allowed myself to hope for a child because hope required certainty—and we didn’t even have marriage.
Then I heard him.
Dominic’s voice sliced through the room, cold and merciless.