The sky was stained with bruised clouds, low and threatening, as if the heavens themselves held their breath for what was to come. I stood in the silence of the hallway, the scent of sterilized antiseptic still clinging to my skin from the hours I spent sitting in the hospital's neonatal wing. Every blink felt like a struggle against the images burned into the back of my mind—the faint, mechanical beeping of the machines keeping the baby alive, the translucent skin pulled tight over tiny bones, the way her chest fluttered up and down like the wing of a dying bird.
My daughter. My heart.
She was fighting. Each breath was a war, each movement a declaration that she wasn't ready to leave me—not yet. I couldn't touch her, couldn't hold her, not with all the wires and tubes. But I could whisper. I could pray. I could watch her with every ounce of love I had left to give.
Now, though, I was here. Outside the room where secrets waited to strike like venom.
"Isabella."
