As I checked the screen, I noticed numerous missed calls, the notifications stacked like small emergencies, each one a voice I hadn't been allowed to answer.
"Who's been calling you?" Dominic's voice cut in, sharp and sudden, the way a blade appears in a conversation that was pretending to be civil.
He never used to ask questions like this. In nine years, he had never cared enough to wonder who might want to reach me.
A hint of annoyance flitted through my eyes before I could stop it.
"Someone you don't know," I replied flatly.
He unfastened the top button of his shirt with one hand, a gesture that in another context might have been casual but here, leaning over my hospital bed with that cold gaze bearing down, felt like a predator settling into a more comfortable position before the strike.
"Seraphina, how long do you plan to keep up this spoiled act?"
"I give you an inch and you want the whole mile?"
In the past, whenever he got angry, I'd rush to reflect on my mistakes, to soothe him, to fix things, to smooth the edges of his temper with apologies I had rehearsed so many times they no longer meant anything.
But now?
I simply pointed to his buzzing phone on the side table and said, without emotion, "It's Daniela."
The moment her name left my lips, Dominic's expression softened with a hint of a smile, the first warmth I had seen on his face in days, and it wasn't for me, and it had never been for me.
Without another glance at me, he rose from the chair and stepped into the corridor to take her call, the door clicking shut behind him with the soft finality of a man choosing, again, the same thing he always chose.
As soon as he left, my phone rang, the vibration loud against the metal tray in the quiet room.
Taking a deep breath, I answered the call.
Before I could say anything, the voice on the other end broke through, anxious and urgent, the sound of someone who had been pacing for days.
"Weren't you supposed to meet me? Seraphina, did you change your mind?"
"No... I didn't. Something just came up," I said, and my voice cracked on the last word in a way I couldn't control, the way a wall cracks before it falls.
"Something came up? What happened? No, this won't do. I'm coming back. I'm flying home myself!"
I cut off the person on the other end of the secure line, my voice barely above a whisper as I lowered my gaze and pressed my lips together.