Chapter 1 - The Jacket on the Chair
When Caleb Rowan came home two days early, he expected flowers to be the first thing his wife noticed.
He had bought them at the airport in Charleston from a tired woman wrapping bouquets near baggage claim, then stopped at the café where he and Hannah had celebrated their first anniversary. He had a paper bag of warm biscuits, two coffees, and the kind of nervous happiness men feel when they have been gone too long and want the doorway to forgive them before they even step through it.
He wanted to surprise his wife.
Instead, he found her on the bedroom floor.
“Hannah?”
The flowers slipped from his hand.
His eight-month-pregnant wife was collapsed beside their open suitcase, wearing a light aqua robe that had fallen loose at one shoulder. Her face was nearly colorless. One hand clutched the edge of the bed, the other pressed beneath the curve of her abdomen. Their wedding portrait lay shattered near her knee, the glass cracked across the smiling version of them from three years earlier.
And on the chair beside the bed was a man’s dark jacket.
For several shameful seconds, Caleb understood the room entirely wrong.
The unevenly fastened shirt beneath Hannah’s robe. The unfamiliar jacket. The broken portrait. His mother’s voice in his memory, patient and poisonous: Some wives become restless when their husbands travel, Caleb. Don’t be blind just because you want to be kind.
Suspicion reached him before reason did.
Then Hannah looked up.
Her lips trembled.
“Caleb… I can’t feel the baby moving.”
Everything inside him went cold.
The accusation forming in his mind vanished so completely it left only terror behind.
He dropped his travel bag, crossed the room, and caught her as her body sagged sideways. Hannah gripped his sleeve with surprising strength, her fingers digging into the fabric.
“Someone answered for me,” she whispered.
“What?”
But she could barely breathe through the next wave of pain.
Caleb fumbled with his phone so badly he dialed the emergency number wrong the first time. His hands were shaking when he finally reached the dispatcher and gave their address. He answered questions about bleeding, pain, consciousness, fetal movement, weeks of pregnancy, all while pressing a clean towel beneath Hannah and trying not to look at the color spreading over the fabric.
“I called you seventeen times,” she said.
“My phone was off during the flight. I came early. I wanted to surprise you.”
Her eyes closed.
“I called your mother.”
Caleb stopped breathing.
Lorraine Rowan had an emergency contact number for his construction sites because Caleb often worked in areas with limited signal. Hannah must have called her when she couldn’t reach him.
“What did she say?”
Hannah’s voice thinned.
“She said I was panicking again. She said the hospital told her I should lie down and wait.”
Before Caleb could respond, paramedics rushed into the bedroom.
One medic looked at Hannah, then at the towel, then at his partner.
“Possible placental abruption. We’re leaving now.”
As they lifted Hannah onto the stretcher, a paramedic picked up the dark jacket and handed it to Caleb.
“Yours?”
Caleb shook his head.
In the ambulance, while Hannah faded in and out beside him, he searched the pockets.
Inside was an identification card.
Dr. Elias Morgan.
Obstetrics.
May you like
The jacket did not belong to a lover.
It belonged to the doctor who had reached Hannah before her husband did.
