I find the hospital front desk on autopilot, give Summer's name to a woman with reading glasses perched at the end of her nose who looks at me the way people look at car accidents. She checks her computer and gives me a room number.
The hallway to her room is long and fluorescent and completely indifferent to whatever I'm feeling, which I appreciate. My footsteps are steady. My jaw is set.
I push open her door.
The first thing I register are the white bandages everywhere. Her wrists wrapped thick as winter gloves. More gauze climbing up her forearms, disappearing beneath the hospital gown. Her collarbone, her shoulders, the parts of her I can see above the blanket, all of it dressed and re-dressed in that clinical white that somehow makes everything look worse than a wound could. Whoever treated her had a lot of work to do.
Dozens of cuts, judging by the sheer volume of bandaging.
I stand in the doorway for a moment and just look at her, this woman I married, this woman who has spent the better part of a month systematically dismantling what was left of my life, lying in a hospital bed wrapped up like something broken.
She looks small and vulnerable.
I know better than to let that mean anything.
Her eyes open slowly, and I watch her register me. Something moves behind those ice-blue irises. Then her face arranges itself into a smile. Not the desperate kind I heard in those voicemails. Not the raw, animal panic of a woman standing in the street screaming after a car that wouldn't stop.
This one is different. This one is satisfied.
"Scotty, baby," she purrs. "You came."
She tilts her head against the pillow, watching me with half-lidded eyes.
"I bet you missed me really bad, didn't you?"
The smile spreads as she says it, and something in her expression shifts and settles into something that I can only describe as proud of herself. Like she's already won whatever game she decided we were playing the moment she picked up whatever she used to do this to herself.
I step inside and let the door swing shut behind me. I pull the folded papers from inside my jacket and set them on the bedside table with a flat, deliberate sound.
"We're getting a divorce."
Summer glances at the papers the way you'd glance at a menu you've already decided you're not ordering from. A small laugh escapes her, almost musical, like I've said something charmingly naive.
"Oh? News to me."
"I'm not staying with you, Summer."
"Scotty." She says my name like a sigh, like she's slightly bored and slightly amused and has been waiting for me to catch up to something she figured out days ago. The smile gets wider. She clicks her tongue against the roof of her mouth five times, slow and deliberate, and shakes her head against the pillow in small, patient arcs.
"No, no, no, no, no." Each word lands soft and separate, like she's correcting a child. "You bad boy." Her eyes hold mine. "You are most certainly not getting away from me."
"Yeah?" My voice comes out drier than I intend. "And why's that?"
"I have a trump card." She coos.
The phrase lands with a kind of theatrical weight, and for a second I just look at her. At the bandages. At the hospital gown. At the way she's arranged herself against the pillow like she's posing for something.
"Oh yeah?"
Her expression changes. The bored amusement drops away and something else rises up to replace it, something bright and electric and almost childlike in its excitement. Her ice-blue eyes go wide. She looks at me like she just flipped a trap card on my ass.
Her hand moves slowly, deliberately, to rest against her stomach.
"I'm pregnant with your baby, Scotty."
The words hit the room and just stay there.
"A little version of you and me," she continues, her voice dropping into something soft and reverent, her palm pressing flat against the thin hospital gown. "Right now. Inside me."
"You're lying." The words come out flat. No heat behind them, just the simple, factual assessment of a man who has been lied to in more creative ways than most people get to experience in a lifetime.
Her smile gets wider. More unhinged at the edges. The kind of smile that lives just slightly outside the zip code of normal.
"I'm really not, baby." She nods toward the clipboard hanging on the bedrail beside her. "Check it yourself."
I grab it. I don't know if I'm allowed to grab it. I do it anyway.
The chart is dense with clinical language, notes about her mental state, medication considerations, a crisis assessment that makes for some genuinely grim reading. And there, about halfway down, nestled between her blood work results and a triage note, is exactly what she said it would be.
Confirmed pregnancy.
I stare at it for a long moment.
Then I set the clipboard back on the bedrail with a small, quiet click.
"I don't care." I say quietly.
"It's yours, Scott," she says, and her voice has gone soft.
"I doubt it."
"Oh, it is, Scotty." The softness evaporates and something fierce replaces it, proud and almost offended. "I will happily get a DNA test the second they let me out of this bed. The second they take these off." She lifts one bandaged wrist slightly and lets it drop. "I will prove it to you without blinking."
I close my eyes. Breathe out through my nose. One long, slow exhale that I've used in meetings when I need to find the floor beneath my feet again.
"I don't care." I repeat.
A beat of silence.
"...What?"
I open my eyes and look at her directly. "I don't care if you're pregnant with my child. We're getting a divorce."
Her face breaks. Like a plate dropped on tile, clean and sudden and irreversible. The satisfied smile, the electric pride, the whole carefully constructed performance, all of it shatters at once and what comes up from underneath it is raw, ugly, and genuinely furious.
"What the fuck are you saying to me right now?" Her voice drops dangerously low. "You think I'll let you walk out that door and ever see our baby? You think that's how this works?" The monitors beside her beep slightly faster. "You will not, Scott. You will not."
"I'll take my chances with you in court." I stand my ground.
She stares at me.
"Standing where we are today?" I say, keeping my voice level. "I think I'd win."
The disgust that moves across her face is satisfying. Her lip curls, her eyes go sharp. Then she breathes. In through her nose, out slow, her shoulders dropping deliberately back against the pillow.
She reaches for me with one bandaged hand.
"Scotty." My name in her mouth like something she owns. "Baby, listen to me. You are not going to win custody from me." She says it like it's obvious. "And I promise you, if you're not with me, I will ruin that child's life. I will raise them to hate you." A pause, like she's choosing the next part carefully. "And I will raise them to hate themself."
Something goes cold in my chest.
I reach into my jacket pocket and pull out my phone.
Her eyes track the movement.
"Then I'm glad I've been recording this conversation," I say.
Every trace of theatrical calm leaves her, the woman who thought she held all the cards evaporates. Her eyes go wide and desperate. Not the performed vulnerability of the hospital bed. Something genuinely uncontrolled.
"Seriously?" The word comes out stripped bare.
"I don't trust you, Summer." I hold her gaze.
She stares at my phone like it's a weapon pointed at her. Her jaw works silently for a moment. The monitors beside her tick along, indifferent. One of her bandaged hands has curled into a fist against the mattress.
"You can't use that," she says finally, her voice recovering some of its edges. "I'm in a hospital. I'm a patient. There are privacy laws, Scott, you can't just…"
"I'll let my lawyer sort out what's usable and what isn't." I slide the phone back into my pocket.
Her face crumbles.
Her eyes fill up fast, the ice-blue going glassy, and for a second she looks genuinely terrified. Not of the recording. Not of the divorce papers. Of me leaving.
"You can't do this to me." Her voice rises, sudden and cracking wide open. "You did this to me, Scott. I'm only like this because of you." Her bandaged hand slaps the mattress. "Why can't you just forgive me for cheating? Why is that so impossible for you?"
Something in my chest gives way. The tears are already stinging at the back of my eyes before I can stop them.
"Summer. It's not…"
"Don't try to tell me it's not." She sobs.
"It's not."
"It is." She's crying hard now, the ugly kind. "You're leaving me because I slept around. Because of what I became over there. Because of what I let happen to me, and you can't look at me the same way and you know it."
"Summer." I pull the chair from against the wall and sit down in it, close to her bed. "I'm not divorcing you for the cheating."
She laughs through her sobs, wet and disbelieving. "Yes you are."
"No."
"You are, Scott, you are, you can't stand what I…"
"I'm not." My voice comes out quiet and certain and she must hear something in it because she stops arguing, even if she doesn't stop crying. The monitors tick along beside us. The fluorescent light hums its indifferent hum.
"Summer." I start and stop. Start again. "I understood why you left me."
She makes a sound that isn't quite a word.
"I understood it," I say. "And there were times, while you were gone, where I really fucking hated you for it. I won't pretend otherwise. I hated you in ways I didn't know I was capable of." I pause. "But I always understood."
The crying doesn't stop. It shifts into something quieter, more wretched.
"You were with me from the very beginning of it," I continue. "From the first time I got hooked on drugs all the way through to when I finally..." I search for the right word and land somewhere honest. "...to when I finally climbed out the other side. That's well over a decade, Summer. Over a decade of me being the one who needed rescuing."
I look up at her. Her face is a mess.
"I cannot imagine how isolating that felt. To spend your twenties cleaning up after someone you loved. To be the one who always had it to hold it together because one of you had to." My voice drops. "To clean me up. Constantly. Over and over again."
She makes a sound then, low in her throat, something strangled and involuntary, like the words are physically hurting her.
"To watch me almost kill myself," I keep going, even though part of me wants to stop. "More than once. Maybe more times than I even know about. The times I don't remember. The times you never told me." I breathe. "And you were always there with a smile. You were always the one asking how bad is it tonight, Scott. You were always the one saving me."
I feel the tear before I know it's coming, just a single one, tracking down the side of my face.
"I'll never truly know how lonely that made you feel. How completely unseen."
Summer's head drops back against the pillow, her whole body shaking with sobs she can't seem to get ahead of.
"So when Taevion came along, and he swooped in and made you the center of something. Made you the one who was wanted instead of the one who was needed. Made you feel like you were the one that mattered." I pause. "I don't know what that felt like for you. I genuinely don't. But I get why you went."
The room is full of nothing but her crying and the machines and the rain I can hear faintly somewhere beyond the window.
"Then why can't we be together?" She says through tears.
The question just sits there between us, honest and devastated in a way that none of the threats or the trump cards or the satisfied smiles ever were.
I feel the tear on my cheek and I don't wipe it away.
"Because you drugged me, Summer."
She closes her eyes.
"You looked at me," I say slowly, "and you decided that my feelings weren't something you could trust. That you had to manufacture them. That you needed to reach into my chemistry and rewire it to make sure I stayed." I lean forward slightly in the chair. "And I hear everything I just said to you. I mean every word of it. I owe you more than I can ever pay back for what you gave me during those years." My voice cracks on the next part and I let it. "But I can't be with someone who did that to me. I can't."
She doesn't say anything for a long moment. Just lies there with her eyes closed.
I stand up.
The chair scrapes back against the linoleum. Her eyes open.
"I'll always care about you," I tell her, and I mean it in the way you mean things that cost you something to say. "That doesn't go away. It's just not enough anymore." I glance at her stomach. "And if the child is mine, we'll deal with that when the time comes. Through lawyers. Through whatever process we need to go through." I pause. "But we'll deal with it."
I take the first step toward the door.
"Scott."
I keep walking.
"Scott, no. Please. Please don't. Scott, please…"
I reach the door and put my hand on it.
"SCOTT!"
The scream tears through the room so loud the monitor alarm stutters. I stop with my palm flat against the door, not because I'm reconsidering, but because she deserves at least this much.
"I'LL KILL YOU!" Her voice is barely recognizable now. "I SWEAR TO GOD, SCOTT, I SWEAR I'LL…"
Then it breaks.
The scream dissolves into more sobbing.
"I'll kill myself." The words come out wrecked and wet. "I'll kill myself and our baby. I swear I will. I'll do it, Scott. I'll do it right now."
I close my eyes.
One final breath.
"No you won't, Summer."
I say it quietly. Not as a challenge. Not as a dare. Just as the plain, flat truth of what I believe.
"I'm sorry it had to be this way."
I push the door open and walk through it despite the screeching behind me.
And for the first time in a long time. I feel free.