Her Final Countdown

Chloe's POV

The diagnosis came out.

The doctor set the imaging report on the desk and said the words in the careful, practiced tone of a man who had delivered this kind of news many times before.

"Stage IV. Non-small cell. Liver, stomach. You won't make it to Christmas, Ms. Winston."

I sat in the plastic chair across from him and listened, and the fluorescent light above us hummed on exactly as it had before he spoke, as if nothing had changed at all.

Only I knew how hard I was working to hold myself together.

I drove home and made Mia her oatmeal.

After she fell asleep, I sat on the edge of her bed and watched her face in the dark, thinking of everything and nothing all at once.

Three months. If the doctor was right and that was truly all I had left, then there was only one thing I could not let go of — Mia. What would happen to her when I was gone, and who in this world could I trust to give her to?

Ethan. His name surfaced before I'd finished the thought.

Ethan Hartman — Mia's father, even if he didn't yet know she existed. No one in the world had a stronger claim to her than he did.

I had to go back to Cedar Haven. Back to the place where I had once been happy, and where I had been buried alive.

The day we landed at Cedar Haven Regional, Mia was beside herself with excitement, the way small children are when the world still feels like something worth running toward.

Mia ran ahead so fast that I couldn't keep up, and I watched from a few steps behind as she lost her footing — my chest seizing before I could close the distance.

Then a tall figure swept in and caught her before she hit the ground, and I exhaled.

I started forward to say thank you, and then I saw his face, and I stopped.

Ethan Hartman.

He set her gently back on her feet, smoothing her coat with the same careful hands, and said something low and even — something about slowing down, about how the floor was wet, the kind of quiet, unhurried words you'd use with a child you didn't want to frighten.

That gentleness used to belong to me.

Before the case. Before everything broke apart five years ago and became something I no longer recognized.

I hadn't finished the thought when a familiar voice rang out across the terminal, calling his name.

I looked up. Serena — my sister in name only, the woman living in my house, wearing my life — crossed toward him with her hand already reaching for his arm, and together they turned and walked away without looking back.

I must have gone somewhere far away inside my own head, because I didn't come back until I felt Mia's arms clamp around my legs, her face pressed hard into my coat.

"Mommy, I won't run anymore, I promise, please don't be mad," she was saying, her voice climbing toward panic, and I blinked and looked down at her and came back to myself.

I crouched down and pulled her in.

"Mama's not angry, baby," I said against her hair. "I was just thinking about something."

She went still in my arms, the panic draining out of her small body, and I held her a beat longer than I needed to. Over her shoulder, the departures corridor was empty.

Ethan and Serena were gone. It was not hard to tell that they were a couple now. Would he even want Mia? Would there be any room for her in that life?

The thought sat in my chest like something swallowed wrong.

But he was still the only person I could think of when I tried to imagine leaving her with someone. Her father.

And whatever else he had become, whatever had passed between us — I had just watched him crouch on a wet airport floor for a child he didn't know, patient and unhurried, like it was the most natural thing in the world.

That had to count for something.

The apartment I rent was on Birchwood Lane, half a level below the street, the kind of place where the windows showed you nothing but passing ankles and tire slush.

It was small, and it was cold, and the baseboards clicked all night like something trapped inside the walls, but it would keep the wind out, and for now, that was enough.

I got Mia settled first.

She was half-asleep by the time I carried her through the door, her head heavy against my shoulder, her small fingers still loosely curled around the strap of her backpack.

I laid her down on the mattress I'd had delivered the week before, pulled the secondhand quilt up to her chin. I stood there in the dark for a moment, just listening to her breathe, before I quietly pulled the door shut and went back to the main room.

Then I picked up my phone and called Carter Hartman.

He was Ethan's old friend, the only person left in that circle who would still take my call. And he was the only one who had never fully believed I was a traitor, the only one who still thought — or wanted to think — that I had nothing to do with what happened to Hartman five years ago.

He was also the only way I had left to reach Ethan.

The line connected after two rings, and the voice that came through was familiar and carefully courteous, the kind of tone you use with numbers you don't recognize.

"Carter Hartman speaking. Who's calling?"

"It's Chloe," I said. "Chloe Winston."

The courtesy dropped out of his voice all at once.

"Chloe." A pause, brief and weighted. "When did you get back?"

"Today," I said. "Just got in. We're settled now."

"We?" Carter asked, puzzled.

"My daughter," I said.

There was a sound on the other end that might have been him inhaling wrong. "Your — Chloe, you got married?"

"No," I said. "She's Ethan's."

The silence that followed was long enough that I pulled the phone from my ear to check the call was still connected. I couldn't blame him for it. When I'd left Cedar Haven five years ago, I hadn't told a single person I was pregnant.

"Carter," I said, before the silence could settle into something harder to move. "I need you to help me get Ethan to meet with me. Just a conversation. Can you do that?"