I nod because I don’t trust my voice.
The nurse opens one of the side ports and says, “You can touch her hand.”
I slide my fingers through carefully, terrified of being too much for her, and brush the back of her tiny hand.
She curls her fingers around one of mine.
That’s it.
That’s the moment my heart leaves my body and settles somewhere outside me forever.
“Oh,” I whisper. Tears stream down my face. “Hi,” I murmur to her. “Hi, baby.”
She doesn’t open her eyes, but her grip tightens for a second, as if she knows exactly where I am.
I don’t know how long I stay like that. Time feels different in there. Smaller. More tender. The nurse speaks to me once or twice, but most of what I hear is my own breathing and the little sounds around my daughter’s bed.
Eventually I’m wheeled back out.
The hallway outside my room is quiet when I return. The nurse leaves me for a minute to get my medication, and I sit there with my hands in my lap, still feeling the shape of my daughter’s hand around my finger.
“That was quick.”
I look up. Alina is standing a few feet away, elegant as ever, not a hair out of place, which somehow makes her presence in a hospital corridor feel even more deliberate.
I say nothing.
She steps closer. “May I speak to you?”
I’m too tired to refuse her properly, so I nod once.
For a second neither of us says anything.
Then she steps closer and asks, “How is she?”
It takes me a second to understand she means the baby.
“She’s in the NICU,” I say. “Small, but stable, from what they told me.”
Alina nods once. Not warm, not cold. Just absorbing the information.
“And the wedding?” I ask, because the question slips out before I can stop it. Maybe because some part of me still can’t believe the day simply ended without anyone saying the words aloud.
She gives a short, bitter scoff. “The wedding is over,” she says. “For good.”
There’s no drama in the way she says it. No heartbreak either. Just finality. Like one more thing has broken and she’s too tired to pretend it can be repaired.
I look down at my hands for a moment and then back at her. “I’m sorry.”
She studies my face, and something unreadable passes through her expression. “No,” she says. “You’re not.”
The words should sting, but I’m too exhausted for them to find the right place to land.
Alina glances down the corridor, making sure we’re still alone, then looks back at me. “Listen,” she says, and now her voice lowers, the polish thinning just enough to let something more personal through. “I don’t know what’s going on with Viktor.”
I stay still.
“But whatever this is,” she continues, “it’s moving too quickly, and I’m asking you to think carefully before you let yourself be pulled any deeper into it.”