Chapter 232
Chapter 232:
The administrator led him down a series of sterile, fluorescent-lit corridors and into the subterranean levels of the building. They entered a freezing, highly secured server room lined with digital archive terminals. The administrator logged in with his master credentials, typed June Erickson’s name into the database, and then murmured, “I’ll leave you to it, sir,” before practically fleeing the room.
Cole dropped into the plastic chair. His massive frame looked absurd in it. His hands shook so badly he could barely control the mouse.
He clicked on the first file — the Emergency Room Admission Log from exactly six months ago.
The harsh blue light of the monitor fell across his face. His eyes moved across the clinical text.
Patient admitted via emergency transport. Extreme abdominal pain. Hypovolemic shock. Blood pressure 70/40.
Cole’s brow furrowed. Shock?
𝘛𝘩𝖾 𝗺𝘰s𝘁 𝗉𝘰𝗉u𝗅𝘢𝗿 n𝗈vе𝗅ѕ 𝘰𝗇
His eyes dropped to the primary diagnosis line, printed in bold black letters.
Diagnosis: Ruptured Ectopic Pregnancy. Massive internal hemorrhaging.
The air left the room entirely.
Cole’s heart stopped. The words burned into his retinas like acid.
Ectopic pregnancy.
Not an abortion. Not a cold, calculated decision to destroy his child. It was a fatal, uncontrollable medical emergency. The baby had grown in her fallopian tube. It had ruptured inside her.
His lungs seized. He clicked to the next page with a trembling finger.
It was the surgical consent form.
The line for Spouse / Emergency Contact Signature was completely blank.
Below it, on the patient consent line, was June’s signature. The handwriting was jagged, barely legible — the signature of a woman who had signed the form to have her own organ removed while she was bleeding to death, entirely alone.
Cole’s eyes moved to the timestamp at the top of the page.
October 15th. 11:30 PM.
That date. That exact time.
The memory came at him like a freight train.
October 15th. He had been standing on the deck of a multi-million-dollar yacht on the Hudson River, holding a glass of champagne, hosting a lavish, heavily publicized birthday party for Alycia Beasley. His phone had vibrated in his pocket. He remembered looking at the screen. It was June.
He had assumed she was being a jealous, nagging wife trying to ruin his evening. He had pressed the red button and rejected the call.
She called him seventeen times that night. He had switched his phone off.
While he was cutting a birthday cake for a fraud, his wife had been lying on a freezing steel table, bleeding to death, calling the man she loved to come save her.
A violent wave of nausea erupted in Cole’s stomach. He shoved the chair back, dropped to his knees, and crawled to the small trash can in the corner. He gripped the edges and retched violently — the whiskey, the bile, everything. But he couldn’t purge the suffocating, crushing weight of what he had done.
He was the monster. His neglect had killed his child. His absence had nearly killed his wife.
Cole collapsed onto the freezing linoleum floor. He curled onto his side, his hands clawing at his own hair, pulling at the roots. A broken, agonizing sob tore from his throat — the sound of a man whose soul was coming apart at the seams.