stomach.

The movement made her smile.

“Still stubborn.”

She rose, looked toward the ballroom, and screamed.

The sound was magnificent.

It carried terror, love, shock, everything she did not feel.

“Help! Somebody help us! Mara fell!”

People poured onto the terrace.

Men shouted.

A woman cried out.

Someone slipped on the steps trying to reach me.

Celeste knelt again and took my hand in both of hers as if she had been holding it all along.

“Stay with me,” she sobbed for the audience.

“Please, stay with me.”

I tried to pull away.

She squeezed harder.

“Careful,” she whispered through her teeth, still smiling for everyone else.

“Nobody likes a hysterical widow.”

I heard Julian before I saw him.

“Mara!”

His voice broke across the garden.

Then he was there, coat open, hair wet, face drained of color.

He dropped beside me so fast his knees hit stone.

“Do not move,” someone shouted.

Julian’s hands hovered above me, afraid to touch and afraid not to.

“Mara, look at me.”

I tried.

His face blurred.

“She,” I whispered.

Celeste made a wounded sound.

“Julian, she is confused.

She slipped.

I tried to catch her.”

Julian did not look at his mother.

He looked at my wrist.

At the little gold bracelet he had given me after the first anonymous letter arrived under our apartment door.

The bracelet had a tiny safety charm, a smooth golden disk engraved with a star.

It looked sentimental.

Celeste had once called it cheap.

Julian touched the charm with two fingers.

A small blue light blinked once.

His face changed.

Not grief.

Not panic.

Recognition.

Then he leaned close to my ear.

“I have you,” he said.

“Both of you.

I swear.”

The ambulance arrived within minutes.

Celeste rode separately in a black town car, wrapped in a borrowed shawl, already weeping into her phone.

By the time we reached St.

Orlan Medical Center, the story had begun to harden around her version.

Pregnant wife fainted.

Tragic accident.

Distraught mother-in-law tried to save her.

I drifted in and out beneath bright hospital lights.

Voices moved around me.

A nurse cut away the wet fabric of my dress.

A doctor asked questions I could not answer.

Someone kept saying the baby’s heartbeat was steady but needed watching.

Steady became my favorite word in the world.

Through the glass wall of the trauma bay, I saw Celeste in the corridor with Julian.

She had changed quickly from terror to devastation.

Her makeup was smudged just enough to look human.

She held his sleeve with both hands.

“She slipped,” Celeste sobbed.

“I tried to catch her.

I swear on your father’s grave, I tried.”

Julian stood very still.

“Where is her bracelet?” he asked.

Celeste blinked.

“What?”

“Mara’s bracelet.

The gold one.

She was wearing it tonight.”

Celeste’s face flickered.

It was tiny.

Almost nothing.

But Julian saw it.

So did I.

“I don’t know,” she said.

“Why are you asking about jewelry when your wife is—”

“Because you should know what it is before you lie again.”

Her mouth closed.

A nurse shifted between them, blocking my view, and the room dissolved into motion.

They rolled me toward an elevator.

I caught pieces of sentences.

Emergency monitoring.

Possible surgery.

Call neonatal.

Consent.

Julian’s hand found mine before the