Emma lowered the phone.
Her gaze met Derek’s.
If she had been angry, he could have defended himself. If she had been sobbing, he could have told himself she was unstable. If she had been begging, he could have framed himself as the rational one.
But Emma looked at him with something worse than anger.
Pity.
“Help is coming,” she said quietly, fingers gripping the bedrail as another contraction tore through her body. “For me and for our daughter.”
Derek’s voice came out strangled. “Who… who did you just call?”
Emma’s lips curved into a sad, terrible smile. “Too late to be curious now.”
A flurry of movement erupted at the door. Dr. Patricia Chen, the hospital’s chief of surgery, stepped in with two administrators behind her. Her expression was professional, but her eyes held the particular fatigue of someone who had seen what bureaucracy did to bleeding people.
“Mrs. Richardson,” Dr. Chen said.
Derek jerked like he’d been struck.
Emma didn’t react.
“We have authorization,” Dr. Chen continued briskly. “We’re prepping the surgical suite now. We need to move.”
The administrators didn’t look at Derek. They didn’t need to. In their posture, in their sudden urgency, Derek could feel the room rearranging itself around Emma’s gravity.
Veronica’s face tightened. “What is this?” she demanded, but her voice had lost its velvet certainty.
Dr. Chen’s gaze flicked to Veronica like she was a fly buzzing near an open wound. “Step aside.”
The nurses entered with a gurney. Machines were unplugged, reattached. Emma’s bed became a moving island in a flood of medical motion.
As they wheeled her toward the hallway, Emma turned her head slightly, her eyes locking on Derek one last time.
“Richardson Technologies,” she said softly. “Google it.”
Derek’s mouth opened, but no words came out.
“Tell your mother,” Emma added, voice almost gentle, “that I’m sorry.”
Then the doors swung shut between them.
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