Chapter 1 - The Edge of Darkness
The shrieking monitor was the last sound I heard before the world dissolved into cold, suffocating silence.
For thirty minutes, the resuscitation team fought frantically over my lifeless body. Cameron, stripped of his cold arrogance, stood frozen in the corner of the surgical suite. His face was ghastly white, his hands trembling violently as he watched my chief resident, Dr. Julian Vance, perform chest compressions. Julian had shoved Cameron aside the moment he burst through the double doors, screaming for a crash cart.
"Step back, Cameron! You did this!" Julian roared, charging the defibrillator paddles to two hundred joules. "Clear!"
My heart was forced back into a rhythm by electric shock, but the damage was severe. I had suffered massive uterine rupture and internal hemorrhage, followed by hypovolemic shock. They rushed me into emergency surgery—not led by Cameron, who was barred from the room by the hospital chief of surgery, but by a trauma team that fought for six hours to save my life. While I lay unconscious, connected to a ventilator in the Intensive Care Unit, Cameron walked out into the waiting room holding our newborn son, Leo.
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Beside him stood Sophie, squeezing his arm with a counterfeit look of sorrow. "Dr. Bennett, you did everything you could. Dr. Grant was just so reckless..."
Cameron didn't answer. For the first time, looking down at the red, exhausted face of our ten-pound baby boy, the first seeds of doubt began to sprout in his mind. The steel rail I had snapped remained on the floor of the delivery room, a brutal monument to the agony he had dismissed as a "spectacle."
