Catalina had counted the holes in the ceiling so many times she could trace them with her eyes closed.
Seven in the top left tile.
Four in the next.
Three shaped like a crooked smile in the one above her bed.
She counted them because numbers didn’t hurt.
Numbers didn’t bleed.
Numbers didn’t disappear from inside her.
Her hand lay across her abdomen—flat again.
Empty again.
She didn’t cry anymore.
Not because it didn’t hurt, but because the pain had carved her hollow, like the tears had fallen out of someone else’s body, not hers.
The doctor’s words still echoed, soft and merciless:
“I’m so sorry… we couldn’t save the baby.”
Save.
As if anything in her life had ever been saved.
She inhaled, the sterile hospital air burning her throat. The faint beep of a machine in the hallway pulsed like a reminder that life continued outside these walls—even when hers had stopped.
Her vision blurred, but she forced her eyes to stay open, trained on the same three holes on the ceiling tile directly above her.
Three.
Three was the number she’d whispered to her baby the night before the pain started.
“Three things I promise you,” she had murmured, hands over her stomach.
“One, I’ll keep you safe.
Two, I’ll give you a life better than mine.
Three…”
Her voice broke.
Three had been I’ll always be here.
A promise she’d failed before she ever got the chance to keep it.
The door opened quietly.
She heard it, but she didn’t move.
Didn’t flinch.
Didn’t acknowledge.
People walked in and out of her life all the time.
Doors opened, doors closed.
It never changed anything.
Footsteps approached—slow, careful, as if afraid of startling her.
She kept counting.
Two more holes.
Then five clustered together like spilled pepper.
The footsteps stopped beside her bed.
Still, she didn’t look.
Loss felt safer than whatever new disaster waited at her side.
A breath—a man’s—shook slightly before he spoke.
“Catalina…”
Her own breath stalled.
She knew that voice.
Too deep.
Too controlled.
Too dangerous to her heart.
Alessandro.
But his voice wasn’t cold this time.
It was something worse.
It was gentle.
She closed her eyes, refusing to let his presence break her open again.
He didn’t speak at first.
Didn’t touch her.
Just stood there, silence stretching between them like the space where her baby should have been.
Then he whispered, barely audible:
“I heard… what happened.”
Catalina let out a sound—tiny, cracked, almost a laugh but not really.
Of course he had heard.
Pain traveled fast in the Moretti world.
Faster than love.
Faster than truth.
Still she didn’t look at him.
Not even when his next words shattered what little remained of her composure:
“Catalina… I didn’t know you were carrying my child.”
The ceiling blurred completely, holes dissolving into white.
And for the first time since waking up in this bed, her throat made a sound—a choked, broken sob she couldn’t swallow back down.
She still didn’t look at him.
But he stepped closer anyway.
And the agony she’d been drowning in twisted sharply into something else—
Something darker.
Because this man
—the one she had loved,
—the one who doubted her,
—the one who didn’t want her…
was now the only person in the room with her.
And she wasn’t sure which was worse:
That he suddenly cared.
Or that part of her still wanted him to.