Too Late For Regret, Mr. Booth

Elise Preston lowered herself onto the butter-soft leather sofa with the careful precision of a woman carrying eight months of pregnancy in her belly. Her breath hitched as the weight shifted, her lower back screaming from the pressure. She ran her palm over the swell of her stomach, feeling the distinct press of a tiny foot against her ribs.

"Easy, little one," she whispered. "Almost there."

She pulled the grainy ultrasound photo from her coat pocket-she'd looked at it maybe two hundred times since this morning's appointment. Three perfect heartbeats had filled that darkened room with sound. Three. The technician had laughed, said it was the most active set of triplets she'd seen all year. Elise had cried in the parking garage afterward, alone, because Callum hadn't answered his phone. Again.

But he would come. He had to come. She'd left three messages. She'd said it was urgent. She'd said she needed him.

The mahogany double doors swung open without warning.

Elise's head snapped up, her heart leaping into her throat. "Callum?"

The name died on her lips.

Jaida Powers stepped through the doorway like she owned the air itself. Ten inches of red-soled Louboutin clicked against the marble floor, each step a calculated assault. Her platinum Birkin swung from one manicured hand, and when she reached the center of the room, she let it drop.

The bag hit the glass coffee table with a crack that made Elise flinch.

"You're not supposed to be here." Elise's hand moved instinctively to shield her stomach. "This is a private floor."

Jaida laughed. It was a sound Elise had heard before-at gallery openings, at charity functions, always from across crowded rooms where Callum stood too close to this woman and explained it away as old friendship. Family connection. Obligation.

"Private?" Jaida reached into her bag and withdrew a thick envelope, cream-colored, heavy stock, the kind that carried legal weight. "Nothing's private when it comes to Booth family business, Elise. You should know that by now."

She tossed the envelope. It skidded across the glass surface and stopped inches from Elise's knee.

Elise didn't touch it. She didn't need to. The words were already visible, embossed in black, screaming up at her: DISSOLUTION OF MARRIAGE.

Her lungs seized. The room tilted. She heard her own breathing, too loud, too fast, rasping in her ears like she was drowning in open air.

"Pick it up." Jaida moved closer, her perfume-something sharp and expensive-filling the space between them. "Sign it. Or don't. It doesn't matter. Callum's already signed. His lawyer filed it this morning."

"You're lying." The words scraped out of Elise's throat. She pressed her hand harder against her belly, feeling the frantic flutter of three heartbeats against her palm. "He wouldn't. Not now. Not when-"

"When what?" Jaida leaned down, her face level with Elise's, her smile showing too many teeth. "When you're about to pop? Oh, sweetie. That's exactly why. Callum doesn't need you anymore. He needs the babies. And once they're born, he'll have them. Trust funds, custody, the whole Booth legacy. You?" She straightened, flicking invisible dust from her sleeve. "You're just the incubator he used."

Elise's fingers curled into the leather sofa. "He loves me. He-"

"Love?" Jaida's hand went to her throat, her fingers toying with a delicate chain that disappeared beneath the collar of her silk blouse. She pulled it free.

The pendant caught the overhead light. A single diamond, cushion-cut, set in platinum. Elise had seen it once before, in a photograph from Callum's childhood-his mother's necklace. The Booth matriarch's seal. The piece that passed to the woman who would bear the next generation of heirs.

Her vision narrowed. The edges of the room went gray.

"Recognize it?" Jaida let it settle against her collarbone, her thumb brushing the stone with possessive familiarity. "He gave it to me last night. After." She leaned close enough that Elise could see the perfect line of her lip gloss, could smell the wine on her breath. "You want to know why he really married you, Elise? Why he stayed those two miserable years?"

Elise couldn't move. Her body had turned to stone, her blood to ice.

"Five years ago," Jaida whispered, her breath hot against Elise's ear, "someone gave Callum a kidney. Saved his life. Anonymous donor, they said. No name, no face, just a gift from a stranger who loved him enough to cut herself open."

Elise's heart stopped. Literally stopped, one missed beat, then another, her chest hollow and aching.

"That was you, wasn't it?" Jaida pulled back, her eyes bright with vicious delight. "You pathetic little thing. You thought he'd figure it out? That he'd wake up from anesthesia and just know?"

The room spun. Elise gripped the sofa's arm, her nails digging through leather to find the wooden frame beneath.

"I told him it was me." Jaida's voice dropped to a purr. "I showed him scars. I cried at his bedside. And when he asked how he could ever repay me-" She gestured to the necklace, to the room, to the life she'd stolen. "I told him I wanted to be family. Real family. Not some desperate girl who'd give up an organ and expect gratitude in return."

"You didn't-" Elise's voice broke. "You couldn't-"

"I did." Jaida straightened, smoothing her hair. "And you know what the best part is? You lost a kidney for him. You gave him life. And all you got in return-" She tapped the divorce papers with one sharp nail. "-was this."

Something cracked inside Elise's chest. Not metaphorically. A physical sensation, like ribs separating, like muscle tearing, like her body finally understanding what her mind refused to accept.

She lunged.

Her palm cut through the air, aimed for Jaida's perfect cheek, for the smile that had destroyed everything. But Jaida was faster. Her hand shot out, fingers wrapping Elise's wrist like a vice, and twisted.

Elise's arm wrenched backward. Her center of gravity shifted, eight months of pregnancy pulling her off-balance, and she felt herself falling.

The coffee table edge caught her lower back.

The pain was white. Screaming. Infinite. It radiated through her spine and exploded in her pelvis, and she heard herself make a sound she'd never heard before-animal, broken, torn from somewhere deeper than throat.

She hit the carpet. Her hands flew to her stomach, cradling, protecting, but the wetness was already spreading, warm and wrong against her thighs. She looked down and saw red. Dark red. Too much red, pooling beneath her, soaking into the cream-colored rug.

"Oh, look at that." Jaida's voice came from somewhere above, distant and bored. "Messy."

Elise tried to speak. Tried to scream. But her body was shutting down, her vision tunneling to a single point of light, and through that light she saw Jaida step carefully around the spreading stain, saw her pull a phone from her pocket, saw her dial a number with deliberate precision.

"Dr. Vance? It's Jaida. The asset is compromised. Placental abruption," she said, her voice sharp and clinical. "Get your team to the OR on my private floor, now. No records." A pause. "And prepare for a high-risk neonatal transfer. The objective is to secure the heirs, whatever the cost to the incubator."

Elise's hand twitched. Her fingers found the ultrasound photo still crumpled in her pocket, and she held it against her belly as the darkness swallowed her, as the last thing she saw was Jaida Powers walking away, her heels clicking against marble, the sound fading like a heartbeat into silence.

The gurney bucked beneath her, wheels squealing against linoleum, and Elise surfaced through layers of fog to find herself staring at a ceiling that moved. Fluorescent lights strobed past, each one a needle of pain behind her eyes.

"Fetal distress. All three. Prep the OR."

The voice belonged to a woman. Cold. Efficient. Elise tried to turn her head, but something held her-straps, hands, the weight of her own failing body.

"Please." The word came out wrong, slurred, her tongue too thick for her mouth. "My babies-"

"Save your strength, Mrs. Preston. You'll need it."

The ceiling stopped moving. Shadows gathered, shapes in surgical masks and blue scrubs, and then the lights changed. Not fluorescent anymore. Something harsher. Brighter. A surgical lamp that burned through her closed eyelids and turned the world red.

Dr. Eleanor Vance leaned into her field of vision. The mask covered her nose and mouth, but her eyes were visible-gray, flat, utterly without warmth.

"Administering anesthesia now."

"No-" Elise reached out, her fingers catching the fabric of Vance's gown, clinging with desperate strength. "Don't put me under. I need to hear them. I need to know they're-"

Vance peeled her hand away with mechanical precision. "Nurse. Restraints."

Something cold entered Elise's arm. She felt it traveling up her vein, chemical ice that numbed her fingers, her wrists, her shoulders. But her mind-her mind stayed awake. She screamed silently, trapped inside her own skull, as the scalpel descended.

She didn't feel the cut. She felt pressure. Tugging. The obscene sensation of hands inside her body, pulling, separating, extracting.

First: silence.

Second: silence.

Third: a sound. Thin. Weak. Like a kitten mewling in a distant room.

"Female. Apgar three. Get her to the warming unit."

Elise's eyes rolled wildly, trying to see, but a nurse's shoulder blocked her view. She strained against the restraints, her muscles screaming against the paralysis, and through the gap between bodies she saw-shadows. Movement. Two small bundles being carried away, no sound, no motion, nothing to suggest life had ever existed inside them.

"Time of death," Vance said, her voice carrying the casual weight of routine, "twenty-three-forty. Male twin A. Male twin B. Cause: intrauterine asphyxia secondary to placental abruption."

The words hit Elise like physical blows. Twin A. Twin B. Her sons. Her boys. The names she'd whispered to her belly for months-Jacob, she'd thought, for the strong one who kicked hardest. Iaan, for the quiet one who hid against her spine.

Gone.

Tears leaked from the corners of her eyes, tracking sideways into her hair, because she couldn't move her hands to wipe them. The warming unit beeped somewhere to her left, a steady rhythm that meant one child still lived, but the sound brought no comfort. It brought only the crushing weight of what she'd lost.

The OR door swung open.

Jaida Powers entered in full surgical scrubs, her hair tucked beneath a cap, her eyes scanning the room with predatory assessment. She walked to the warming unit and looked down at the squalling infant within.

"Just the one?" she asked.

"Just the one," Vance confirmed. "The boys didn't make it."

"Shame." Jaida's finger traced the glass above the baby's face. "She would have been easier to explain away if they'd all died."

Elise's heart monitor spiked. The beeping accelerated, frantic, and Vance glanced at the screen with professional annoyance.

"She's conscious. The anesthesia didn't take fully."

"Doesn't matter." Jaida turned away from the warming unit, her hand going to the pocket of her scrubs. "She won't remember. They never do. Now, about disposal of the-"

The fire alarm screamed.

Not a drill. A full building alarm, piercing and insistent, accompanied by flashing red lights that replaced the surgical white with strobing emergency color. The intercom crackled to life: "Code Red. Basement level. All personnel evacuate immediately. This is not a drill."

Jaida's face twisted. "What-"

"Sprinkler system in the morgue," a nurse shouted, already moving toward the door. "Electrical fire. We have to go. Now."

The mention of the morgue sent a visible tremor through Jaida, a flicker of something that wasn't part of her plan. Her eyes darted toward Vance, a silent question passing between them before her composure cracked. "Damn it. Irma? Yes, there's a fire. I don't know. No, I can't-" She shoved past Vance, her heels slipping on the wet floor. "Handle the rest. Make sure she doesn't survive the evacuation."

She disappeared through the doorway. Vance hesitated, looking from Elise to the warming unit to the spreading water from the overhead sprinklers, and then she too ran, leaving behind her instruments, her patient, and the single living child in the plastic box.

Silence returned, broken only by the alarm and the hiss of water.

Elise bit her tongue.

The pain was sharp, immediate, copper flooding her mouth. It cut through the chemical fog, gave her something to focus on, something to climb toward. She bit again, harder, feeling the tissue tear, and the shock of it-pain she controlled, pain she chose-shook her awake.

Her fingers twitched. In the chaos of the evacuation, a panicked orderly had slammed a supply cart into the side of her gurney, and the impact had jarred the buckle on one of her wrist restraints, leaving it loose. Elise wrenched one hand free, then the other. Her body screamed in protest. She didn't roll; she slid, a dead weight tumbling off the gurney with a sickening thud. The impact sent a fresh wave of agony through her, tearing at her half-closed incision, and warm blood began to stream down her hips again. She didn't feel it as pain, only as a wetness that signaled her life draining away. She couldn't afford to feel it.

She dragged herself across the floor. The floor was cold and wet, her hospital gown tangling around her knees, her body leaving a trail of red that the sprinklers began to dilute to pink. Three feet. Six feet. Her hand found the leg of the warming unit and she pulled herself up, gasping, her vision black at the edges, and looked inside.

A girl. Tiny, purple-faced, fighting for breath through lungs that weren't quite ready. Her daughter.

Elise's hands shook as she unlatched the unit's side panel. The baby was lighter than she expected, lighter than air, lighter than hope, and she tucked her against her chest with one arm while her other hand searched for balance, for leverage, for escape.

The door burst open.

A young woman in nurse's scrubs stood silhouetted against the emergency lighting, her face pale with shock. "Oh my God. Oh my God, ma'am, you can't-"

"Help me." Elise's voice was barely human, a rasp of blood and desperation. She reached out, her blood-slick fingers closing around the nurse's ankle. "Please. They're coming back to kill us. Help me hide her. Help me save her."

The nurse-Brenda, her badge read, Brenda Kowalski, RN in training-looked from Elise to the baby to the spreading fire alarm, and something in her face shifted. A memory surfaced-another night, another powerful family, another girl who had been silenced. Her own sister. The look in Elise's eyes was the same. Her breath caught, and resolve hardened her features. She dropped to her knees, stripping off her own scrub top to wrap around the infant.

"I know Dr. Vance," she whispered, her voice shaking but certain. "She's not a doctor, she's a monster." She pointed down the hall. "Medical waste chute. It leads to the loading dock. I can get you to the service elevator, but you have to move. Now."

They moved.

The corridor was chaos, evacuating staff and patients streaming toward the main exits, but Brenda pulled Elise against the current, through a supply closet, down a maintenance stairwell that smelled of bleach and decay. Elise's body was failing, her steps staggering, her grip on her daughter the only thing keeping her upright.

The service elevator opened to the alley behind the hospital. Cold air hit her face, November in Manhattan, and Elise stumbled into the darkness with her daughter pressed to her heart.

Behind them, the basement level exploded.

The shock wave knocked her forward, and she fell to her knees on wet pavement, her body finally surrendering. She curled around the baby-her only baby now, her only everything-and watched flames consume the building where her sons had been declared dead, where her medical records burned, where Elise Preston ceased to exist in any database that mattered.

Brenda's hand touched her shoulder. "You need a hospital. Real help."

"No." Elise's voice was stone. "They'll find us. They'll finish what they started." She looked up at the young nurse, at the only person who'd shown her mercy in a night of monsters. "Tell them I died in the fire. Tell them there were no survivors."

"Ma'am-"

"Please." Elise pressed her daughter closer, feeling the faint flutter of that tiny heart. "Her name is Heaven. Help me give her a life. Please."

Brenda looked at the burning building. At the blood-soaked woman on the ground. At the infant breathing against her makeshift swaddle.

She took off her badge and pressed it into Elise's hand. "There's a clinic in Queens. St. Agnes. Ask for Sister Margaret. Tell her Brenda sent you."

Then she turned and ran back toward the fire, toward the lie that would save two lives, and Elise Preston disappeared into the November night with her daughter in her arms and her sons' names etched into the ash of her memory.

Four years had not been kind to November in New York.

Elise pulled Heaven's hood tighter against the wind cutting down Madison Avenue, her fingers adjusting the wool with the automatic precision of four years of practice. The child beneath the fabric was too pale, her lips too blue, her breath coming in shallow sips that never quite filled her lungs.

"Almost there, baby." Elise's voice was steady, practiced, the tone she'd perfected through sleepless nights and emergency room visits and the constant, grinding fear that each breath might be the last. "Dr. Frye is the best. He's going to fix your heart, just like we talked about."

Heaven nodded, too tired to speak, her small hand finding Elise's with familiar trust. She was four years old and she knew the names of seventeen different cardiac medications. She knew what a catheter was. She knew that sometimes mom cried in the bathroom where she thought no one could hear.

She didn't know about the brothers she'd lost. She didn't know about the father who thought she was dead. She didn't know that the woman walking beside her was legally nonexistent, a ghost haunting the margins of a life she'd once owned.

Mount Sinai Hospital rose before them, glass and steel pretending to be warmth. Elise guided Heaven through the revolving doors, past the information desk, toward the elevators that would carry them to the pediatric cardiology wing on three.

"Mommy, water?"

"Of course." Elise spotted the alcove at the corridor's end, the vending machines huddled together like mechanical sentinels. "Wait right here on this bench. Don't move. I'll be thirty seconds."

Heaven settled onto the padded seat, her legs swinging, too short to touch the floor. She pulled a worn picture book from her bag-a gift from Sister Margaret, something about a brave little engine-and began to read with the fierce concentration of a child who'd learned early that distraction was its own kind of medicine.

Elise walked to the coffee machine, her heels clicking against marble. She fumbled for change, her mind already drafting questions for Dr. Frye, already rehearsing the arguments she'd need to convince him to take Heaven's case despite the waiting lists, despite the insurance complications, despite everything.

The machine gurgled. Hot liquid filled her cup.

"-absolutely unacceptable. I don't care what the board says, tell them I'll triple the endowment."

The voice came from her right. Female. Sharp. Familiar in a way that made Elise's spine straighten before her conscious mind caught up.

She turned.

Jaida Powers stood three feet away, her phone pressed to her ear, her Chanel suit immaculate, her hair swept into that same effortless chignon Elise remembered from a lifetime ago. She was facing the window, her profile elegant, her expression irritated in the way of people who'd never been denied anything.

Elise's hand tightened on her coffee cup. The cardboard softened, threatened to collapse.

Jaida ended her call. She turned.

Their eyes met.

The coffee cup hit the floor. Jaida's phone followed, a $2,000 piece of technology shattering against marble with a sound like breaking bone.

"You-" Jaida's hand went to her throat, to the necklace that still hung there, the Booth matriarch's diamond catching the fluorescent light. "You can't-this isn't-"

Elise stepped forward. Her heel came down on the phone's screen, grinding glass into powder.

"Hello, Jaida." Her voice was ice. Controlled. Four years of rage compressed into two syllables. "Long time no see."

Jaida retreated until her back hit the window. Her face had gone the color of old parchment, her eyes darting toward the elevator, the security desk, any witness who might see this confrontation she hadn't prepared for.

"You're dead." The words squeaked out, childish, absurd. "The fire. They found your-there was a body-"

"Mistaken identity." Elise moved closer, close enough to smell Jaida's perfume, that same sharp scent from four years ago. "Happens more than you'd think. Especially when someone pays for the mistake."

She reached out. Jaida flinched, but Elise only adjusted her collar, her fingers brushing silk with deliberate intimacy. "You look well. The Booth family diet agrees with you. Tell me-" She leaned in, her lips almost touching Jaida's ear. "-do you still sleep through the night? Or do the babies wake you? The ones you helped kill?"

Jaida's breath came in shallow gasps. "Don't-don't you dare-this is Booth property. Callum sponsors this wing. One word from me and security-"

"Will do what?" Elise stepped back, her smile showing teeth. "Escort out the grieving mother? The widow you manufactured?" She turned, her coat sweeping behind her. "Don't worry, Jaida. I'm not here for you. Not yet. But when I am-" She looked back, one final glance. "-you'll know. You'll know exactly what I want, and you'll give it to me, because the alternative is worse than anything you can imagine."

She walked away, her heels steady, her coffee forgotten on the floor. Behind her, she heard Jaida stumble toward the stairwell, heard the frantic dialing of a replacement phone, heard the whispered terror of a woman who'd thought her sins were buried.

Elise rounded the corner toward Heaven's bench and found it empty.

Her heart stopped. Literally stopped, that same missed beat from four years ago, her body remembering trauma her mind had tried to forget.

"Heaven!"

She ran to the nurse's station, her composure cracking, her hands slamming against the counter. "My daughter. Four years old, pink coat, heart condition-she was right there, I left her for thirty seconds-"

The nurse looked up, her expression calm but concerned. "Ma'am, please. Your daughter started coughing, so I brought her over here to have a seat where I could keep an eye on her. She's right there." She gestured to a small chair just behind the counter, where Heaven was looking at a picture book, her coughing having subsided. Just then, the door to the VIP playroom a few feet away opened, and a nurse emerged, followed by a small, solemn boy. The boy's eyes, a startling shade of blue, immediately found Heaven. He stopped walking. The nurse at the station noticed his gaze. "Oh, Jacob, there you are. This is Heaven. She's waiting for her mother, too."

Elise's blood went cold. The name. The face. It couldn't be.

The nurse smiled kindly at Elise. "This is Jacob Booth. The philanthropist's son. Such a polite child, though he never smiles-"

Elise was already moving, her feet carrying her toward her daughter, her eyes locked on the boy.