Chapter 2
Dr. Robert Wright’s lips parted, but for a moment no sound came out.
The delivery room, only seconds ago filled with the bright cry of new life, fell into a silence so fragile it seemed one breath could break it. Joanna stared at him from the hospital bed, exhausted, pale, and trembling beneath the thin blanket. Her newborn son whimpered softly in the nurse’s arms, wrapped in blue fabric, his tiny fist pressed against his cheek.
Robert took one careful step closer.
Then another.
His eyes remained fixed on the mark on the baby’s shoulder — a tiny broken crescent, curved like a sliver of moon torn in half.
Joanna’s heart began to pound.
“Doctor?” she whispered. “What’s wrong with my baby?”
The question pulled him back.
Robert looked at her, and she saw something in his face that frightened her more than panic would have.
Recognition.
Painful, impossible recognition.
He swallowed hard. “Your son…” His voice cracked. “Who is his father?”
Joanna froze.
The nurse looked between them, suddenly uncertain.
Joanna tightened her grip on the sheet. “Why?”
Robert closed his eyes briefly, as if bracing himself against a storm only he could feel. When he opened them again, they were wet with tears.
“Please,” he said quietly. “I need to know.”
A coldness spread through Joanna’s chest.
She had imagined many moments after her child’s birth — joy, fear, loneliness, maybe even a hollow ache where Logan should have been standing. But she had never imagined a doctor staring at her baby as though he had just seen a ghost.
“His name is Logan Wright,” Joanna said.
The room changed.
It was not loud. Nothing crashed. No one gasped dramatically.
But the change was immediate.
The nurse’s eyes widened. Robert’s shoulders sagged as if the name had struck him in the heart.
“Logan,” he whispered.
Joanna stared at him. “Do you know him?”
Robert pressed one hand against the edge of the baby’s bassinet to steady himself.
“I’m his father.”
For several seconds, Joanna heard nothing but the soft beeping of the machines beside her bed.
Then the words sank in.
I’m his father.
Her throat tightened.
“You’re… Logan’s father?”
Robert nodded slowly, grief folding across his face. “Yes.”
Joanna looked at her newborn son, then back at him.
A bitter laugh almost escaped her, but it became a sob instead. “Of course,” she whispered. “Of course this would happen.”
Robert flinched at the pain in her voice.
“I didn’t know,” he said quickly. “I swear to you, I didn’t know about you. I didn’t know about the baby.”
Joanna’s eyes sharpened despite her exhaustion. “He left me seven months ago. The night I told him I was pregnant.”
Robert lowered his head.
The nurse stepped closer to Joanna. “Do you want me to call someone? Or ask Dr. Wright to step out?”
Joanna should have said yes.
She should have demanded space, privacy, protection from the sudden invasion of the family that had abandoned her before they even knew her name.
But the doctor’s tears held her still.
He was not looking at her with shame alone.
He was looking at the baby as though something sacred and broken had been placed before him.
“What happened to him?” Joanna asked, her voice barely audible.
Robert’s face tightened.
For a moment, he seemed decades older.
“Logan died six months ago.”
The room stopped.
Joanna’s breath vanished.
“No,” she said.
Robert’s eyes filled again.
“I’m sorry.”
“No.” Her voice grew sharper. “No, that’s not true. He left. He walked out. He chose to go.”
Robert looked at her with a tenderness that made the truth worse.
“He was in an accident outside Pine Hollow,” he said. “A truck crossed the center line in heavy rain. Logan’s car went off the bridge.”
Joanna stared at him.
The ceiling blurred.
Her hands drifted instinctively to her empty stomach, forgetting for one impossible second that the baby had already been born.
Logan was dead.
The man who had left her.
The man she had cursed.
The man she had imagined returning someday with excuses, apologies, tears.
He had been gone almost as long as she had been waiting.
A sound escaped Joanna’s throat — not quite a cry, not quite a word.
Robert reached toward her, then stopped, unsure if he had the right.
“I thought he abandoned me,” Joanna whispered.
Robert’s voice broke. “I thought he abandoned us too.”
She looked up.
Robert wiped his face with trembling fingers. “The night he left you… he came to our house.”
Joanna’s breathing turned shallow.
“He told me he had ruined everything,” Robert continued. “He said he was going to be a father and that he wasn’t ready. He was terrified. Angry. Ashamed. I said things I should never have said.”
His jaw clenched.
“I told him if he ran from his child, he was no son of mine.”
Joanna shut her eyes.
May you like
“He left in the rain,” Robert said. “My last words to him were spoken in anger.”
The baby whimpered again.
