Chapter 4

The corridor did not move. It was frozen, a photograph of a hospital at the exact moment its most private truth burst out of a sealed envelope. The two nurses had moved closer, side by side now, one of them holding a clipboard against her chest like a shield. The man in the grey hoodie had his phone up, recording, and no one was telling him to put it down. The young couple with the balloon bouquet had retreated further toward the elevator, the woman's hand wrapped around the ribbon so tight that the balloons were beginning to pull against it.

Mara looked at Priya. She looked at the woman who had stood beside her through her mother's funeral, through the wedding planning, through the first failed treatment and the second and the third. The woman who had brought her soup when she was sick and sat with her in parking lots when she couldn't face going home. The woman who had signed her name to a forged document and helped bury the truth.

"Three years," Mara said. "We were friends for three years before I married Derek. You were the maid of honor at my wedding. You stood next to me and you caught the bouquet and you told me I deserved a happy ending."

Priya's face crumpled. She looked like a child caught doing something terrible, her shoulders hunched, her arms wrapped around the baby like a lifeline. "Mara, I—"

"You told me I deserved a happy ending," Mara repeated. "And then you helped take one away."

The words were quiet, spoken without accusation, without heat, and Priya flinched like she'd been slapped. The baby had stopped crying, worn out by his own noise, and was now staring at the ceiling with the glazed, exhausted expression of an infant who had been through too much for his age.

"Mara," Derek said, and his voice had changed. It was softer now, the voice he'd used in the early years, the one that had talked her into the marriage in the first place. "Mara, I know this is—I know it's a lot to process. But you have to understand, I didn't know. I didn't know about any of this. She never told me—"