The Last Time I Waited for Him

I died in the operating room. For a moment I stayed above the table, looking down at the body I had just left.

My abdomen was still open. They had taken one of my kidneys. It had never been for me.

Beside me lay the child I had carried for six months — so small, and no longer moving.

I wanted to reach for my baby. I couldn't make my hands touch anything.

Someone drew a sheet over me. They wheeled my body out, and I drifted into the hall, looking for my husband, Ethan Whitmore, who was waiting outside a different operating room.

He kept watching the doors, his hands clasped so tightly that his fingers had gone pale.

I moved toward him. He didn't turn.

When the doors opened, he was on his feet before the doctor could speak.

"How is she? Is Sloane all right?"

"The kidney transplant was successful," the doctor told him. "You can see her once she's awake."

Ethan closed his eyes and let out a long breath.

Sloane was the woman he'd loved before me — the one I'd once believed he had chosen me over.

Now she was the woman he slipped away to see every night. Even here, with my body somewhere down the hall, he had come for her.

Later, in her recovery room, he pulled a chair up to the bed and took her hand.

She was pale against the pillow. He watched her as though she might disappear if he looked away.

"It's over," he said. "You don't have to be afraid anymore."

Sloane touched his cheek.

"You should go to her, Ethan. I hate that she had to do this for me." Her voice grew faint. "I feel awful about what she's been through."

"Don't." He covered her hand with his. "She could have said yes months ago. You wouldn't have had to go through all this."

I stood beside the bed while he comforted her by blaming me.

He didn't know I was dead. He still thought I owed Sloane an apology.

I had gone into that surgery believing him.

Three days earlier, he had held my wrist at those same doors and pulled me toward them.

I remembered trying to keep up with him, trying to make him look at me.

"Help her, Mara. Once she's well, we can be happy again." His grip tightened. "But if she dies, I'm going with her. I mean it."

I had loved him since I was sixteen. I knew how readily he made threats when he wanted something, and I didn't believe he would kill himself.

Still, I couldn't bear to be the one who called his bluff.

There was more than love holding me there.

After my parents died, all I had left was their failing business and debts I couldn't pay. Ethan's family had covered every cent.

No one had ever paid for me outright, but his family had paid for everything else, and I had never learned where gratitude ended and debt began.

So when he asked for another piece of me, I couldn't find the words to say no.

I wanted our baby. I wanted the future he kept promising me.

Under that pressure, I agreed to end the pregnancy and donate a kidney to Sloane, as if losing our child could save our marriage.

At the hospital, they told me they would induce labor to end the pregnancy. The kidney operation would come afterward.

I kept hearing Ethan's promise: once Sloane was well, we could be happy again.

What came next arrived in fragments: the delivery going wrong, being rushed into surgery, voices calling for blood.

Someone was trying to reach my next of kin. There was no answer.

I never did learn how those last hours fit together.

By the time they stopped trying to save me, Ethan was waiting for news of Sloane.

My body went into a refrigerated drawer.

He stayed in her room.