Chapter 1 - The Twenty-Seven Seconds
The hospital room was dead silent except for the rhythmic, mechanical hum of the incubator and the heavy thud of my own heartbeat. On the screen of my phone, which lay facedown on the hospital sheets, the twenty-seven-second video looped in my mind with the terrifying clarity of a nightmare.
It wasn't a medical emergency. It wasn't a tragic, unavoidable complication in the delivery room.
It was Mark.
The security camera footage had been filmed from an overhead angle in the hospital’s private neonatal staging corridor just three days prior. In the video, Mark stood alone by an open incubator, holding a tiny bundle wrapped in a blue blanket. He wasn't crying. He wasn't panicked. He was looking down at the infant with cold, calculated annoyance, adjusting his watch, before handing the living, breathing child over to a well-dressed, unfamiliar woman who quickly tucked the baby into a plain canvas duffel bag and hurried down the hallway.
Then, the video cut to Mark turning back to the second incubator, pulling out my other son, and carrying him into the general recovery ward where I lay unconscious.
My breath caught in my throat. The room seemed to tilt sideways, the sterile white walls pressing in on me from every direction. Both boys had survived. Both babies had been healthy enough. Mark hadn’t lost one of our twins to a tragedy—he had traded, sold, or given one away, and then looked me in the eyes, burying his face in my shoulder to fake a grief he never felt.
The door clicked.
Footsteps echoed softly against the linoleum floor.
I whipped my head toward the entrance just as the handle turned. My fingers scrambled blindly across the blanket, snatching my phone and shoving it beneath the mattress a fraction of a second before the door swung wide open.
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Mark stepped into the room, holding a cardboard tray with two paper cups of coffee. A gentle, loving smile was plastered across his face, the exact same mask of devotion he had worn every minute since I woke up.
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