The Last Heartbeat

The Last Heartbeat.

NOVEL STATUS: COMPLETED

PUBLISHED CHAPTERS: 30 CHAPTERS

The Last Heartbeat – Sneak Peek

The fluorescent lights above my hospital bed hummed their monotonous song, the same note they’d been hitting for the past three days. I’d memorized every water stain on the ceiling tiles, every crack in the paint. Funny how near-death experiences make you notice things like that.

Julian appeared in the doorway looking like he’d rather be anywhere else—which, to be fair, was probably true.

“Yesterday, Selena deliberately didn’t call me to get me out of your party.”

He said it like he was reporting the weather. Like this was a perfectly reasonable explanation for missing my twenty-fifth birthday. For not answering when I called him twenty-seven times from the ambulance.

“Her Labrador was about to give birth, and she was so nervous she was on the verge of tears. I couldn’t leave her alone. Don’t you understand?”

Do I understand? I wanted to laugh. Maybe I would have, if my abdomen didn’t feel like it had been hollowed out with a rusty spoon.

“Are you seriously getting divorced over something this trivial?” His voice climbed an octave, the way it always did when he was trying to be the reasonable one. “And on top of that, you’re making Clara want to leave my brother too! Does marriage mean nothing to you?”

I watched him pace across the small hospital room. He moved with the confidence of someone who knew they were right, who had never once questioned whether they might be the villain in someone else’s story. Six months ago, he used to pace like this when I had menstrual cramps so bad I couldn’t stand. He’d bring me tea. Rub my back. Hold my hair when I threw up from the pain.

Now he couldn’t even see the IV line in my arm. The drainage tube snaking out from under the blanket. The hospital bracelet that read “HIGH RISK” in cheerful red letters.

“Adriana, when are you going to mature like Selena?”

And there it was. The sentence that made something inside me snap clean in half.

Mature like Selena. The woman who posted Instagram stories about her dog’s birthday parties while I was bleeding out on an operating table. The woman who sent me a decomposing cat in a pink gift box with a card that read “Hope you’re having a purrfect day!”

𝗿𝗼𝗼𝘁 𝗶𝗻𝗳𝗼 ➤ gⱯ︎𝗅︎𝗇︎𝗈︎ν︎𝖊︎𝗅︎𝘀︎⸱ⅽ︎𝗈︎𝗆

I tried to keep the tears in. I really did. There was a pressure building behind my eyes, in my throat, like my body was staging a rebellion against my brain’s strict “don’t cry in front of him” policy.

The tears came anyway. They always did.

Julian saw them—how could he not?—and his expression shifted. Not to concern. Not to love. To something that looked uncomfortably close to disgust. Like I was a problem he’d been hoping to avoid, a mess someone else was supposed to clean up.

“Are you going to cry about this too?”

The words hung in the air between us, sharp as broken glass.

My phone buzzed on the nightstand. A message from Clara: You okay? Want me to come back?

No. I wasn’t okay. But I texted back: I’m fine.

“You don’t understand,” I said, my voice barely above a whisper. “Yesterday—”

“Yesterday, Selena needed me. Her dog—”

“Yesterday, your wife needed you.”

He blinked, as if the concept was foreign. As if “wife” was just a word, not a person currently held together with surgical staples and stubborn pride.

I took a breath. The hospital room smelled like antiseptic and failure. Somewhere down the hall, a baby was crying. Not mine, though. Mine didn’t get the chance.

“Selena sent me something,” I said. “A package. You want to know what was in it?”

Julian’s phone buzzed. He checked it, frowning. “I should probably—”

“A dead cat. Decomposing. In a pink box tied with a bow.”

He looked up from his phone, and for a second—just a flickering, barely-there second—something like doubt crossed his face. Then it was gone, replaced by that familiar expression of patient exasperation. The look he gave me when I asked him to spend less time at Selena’s house. When I suggested maybe, just maybe, a dog’s birthday wasn’t more important than our anniversary.

“That doesn’t sound like something Selena would—”

“The shock put me into premature labor.”

His mouth opened. Closed. His brain was trying to catch up, I could tell. But he’d gotten so good at dismissing me, at filtering out anything I said that didn’t fit his narrative, that the truth couldn’t find purchase.

“Clara rushed me here. To Metropolitan Hospital. Your hospital, Julian. I called you. Do you remember? Do you remember me calling?”

He didn’t answer. His hand moved toward his pocket, toward his phone, and I realized he wasn’t even fully present in this conversation. Part of him was already planning his exit, already thinking about where he needed to be next.

Not here. Never here.

“I had an amniotic fluid embolism.” I said the words carefully, like I was teaching a child. “Uterine hemorrhaging. I needed an emergency C-section, but there was no one to sign the consent forms. No husband. No family. Just Clara, who risked her medical license to save my life.”

The monitors beside my bed beeped their steady rhythm. My heartbeat, displayed in neat green lines. Evidence that I was still here. Still alive. Despite his best efforts to prove otherwise.

“The operation was complicated. Clara and the other doctors didn’t know if I’d make it. But I called you anyway.” A bitter laugh escaped before I could stop it. “I don’t know what I was thinking. Maybe that you’d care. Maybe that our baby would be enough to bring you back.”

Julian’s face was pale now. Good.

“With my last breath—and I mean that literally, Julian, my last conscious breath—I called you.”

“Julian, I have an amniotic fluid embolism… and I’m losing so much blood…”

I remember how my voice sounded on that phone call. Weak. Desperate. Nothing like the woman I used to be before I married him. Before Selena.

“Please, Julian… save me… I don’t want to die.”

Twenty-five years old. That’s all I was. Am. Whatever tense applies when you’re caught between who you were and who you’re becoming.

“I’m only twenty-five… I’m still young.”

I wanted to tell him so many things. That I was scared. That I could see the surgery lights reflected in the terrified eyes of the nurses. That Clara’s hands were shaking when she held mine. That I could taste copper in my mouth and smell something sharp and wrong and final.

“I want to see my baby grow up.”

Even then, bleeding out on a hospital table, I was thinking about the future. Our future. The three of us.

“If I really die…”

I wanted to tell him to take care of himself. To not work too many night shifts. To remember to eat breakfast. To find someone who could love him better than I apparently had.

But he interrupted me.

“Do you know that a dog giving birth is risky too?”

In my hospital room, I could still hear those words. Could still feel the way they’d carved something out of me that would never grow back.

“You said that to me,” I told Julian, who stood frozen in the doorway. “While I was dying. While our baby was dying. You lectured me about veterinary risks.”

“I didn’t—I don’t remember—”

“Of course you don’t. You weren’t listening. You were too busy being angry that I had the audacity to interrupt Selena’s dog’s labor with my own inconvenient medical emergency.”

His hands flexed at his sides. “You’re exaggerating—”

“‘I’m warning you to stop calling and interrupting me while I’m helping Selena’s dog.’” I recited it like poetry, every word burned into my memory. “‘She’s taken care of her for two years. She cares about her a lot, and I’m not going to leave her alone just to celebrate your miserable birthday.’”

“I didn’t say—”

“You hung up on me, Julian. While I was begging you to save my life. You. Hung. Up.”

The words fell into the space between us like stones into water. I watched them sink. Watched him watch them sink.

“I thought I was going to die in that moment,” I said softly. “Honestly? Part of me did.”

The woman who loved Julian Delfin died on that operating table. The woman lying in this hospital bed was someone new. Someone who’d seen exactly what she was worth to her husband, measured against a Labrador retriever and an Instagram influencer with a practiced pout.

Spoiler alert: not much.

Julian’s phone buzzed again. His eyes flicked down automatically, a reflex.

“You should probably get that,” I said. “It might be important.”

He looked at me, really looked at me, and I saw it: the moment he realized this wasn’t a fight he could win with his usual tactics. The moment he understood that something had fundamentally changed, that we’d crossed a line we couldn’t uncross.

But then his phone buzzed again, and the moment passed.

Some lines, apparently, were easier to cross than others.

– Continue in The Last Heartbeat chapter 1 –