While I Lost Everything, He Saved Her Dog

The day I hemorrhaged and lost the baby, my parents drove through a downpour to reach me.

They never made it.

There was a chain collision on the road, and by the time the ambulance got them to the Family's clinic, I was already on the table, fighting to stay alive.

A man in surgical scrubs pushed through the door with the critical-condition forms in hand, his voice low and urgent the way men in our world keep it. "Miss Falcone, your parents are gravely injured. We need a family member to sign right now."

In that moment, I had just lost my child, and the blood beneath me was still pouring out.

My mind was barely holding on as I took the pen with trembling fingers and, with hands smeared in blood, signed my own name to two surgical consent forms.

But in the end, the baby couldn't be saved.

And neither could my parents.

I lay alone in the narrow bed, watching the light over the room go dark, watching the doctor shake his head at me with regret.

In that instant, my whole world seemed to collapse for good.

And the one person I called over and over never picked up.

It wasn't until late that night that I saw his post on the wire.

In the photo, a woman cradled a litter of newborn puppies, her whole face glowing with happiness, and he stood beside her, his gaze so tender it stung my eyes.

The caption was a single line:

【Congratulations, sweet girl. A long, hard night, but you're finally a mother.】

The comments below were wall-to-wall likes and well-wishes, lively as if they were celebrating a new life coming into the world.

And my child's heart had stopped only hours before.

I stared at that post for a long time, then quietly tapped the like.

In under a minute, his message came through.

Two words.

"Delete it."

Cold, like he was shooing away an intruder who'd shown up at the wrong moment.

I looked at those two words and suddenly found them almost funny.

I didn't explain, and I didn't demand anything. I just sent him the address of the clinic.

Then I typed out a line:

"Come here. There's something I want to say to your face."

After the message went out, the other side was silent for a moment.

The reply came quickly:

"I've got something important right now. Can't come."

"Aren't your parents with you for the checkup? They've got nothing else to do anyway."

When I read that, my fingers gave a violent twitch.

The IV needle tugged loose, and blood slowly seeped out around it.

But I couldn't feel the pain.

Because no pain in my body could come close to a fraction of what was in my chest.

I closed my eyes for a moment, then replied slowly:

"This important thing of yours, is it delivering her dog's puppies?"

This time he answered fast.

Every word dripping with impatience.

"Adriana Falcone, what's gotten into you lately?"

"You're just pregnant. Do you have to be this sensitive?"

"Are you seriously jealous of a dog?"

"Can you stop acting like some jealous shrew making a scene over nothing?"

The room was frighteningly quiet.

The monitor ticked out its steady rhythm, loud as a clock in an empty church.

I gazed up at the pale white ceiling and suddenly didn't want to explain a single thing.

He didn't know our child was already gone.

Didn't know I had just signed my parents' surgical consent forms with my own hand.

And he had no idea that I'd asked him to come, not to fight over jealousy.

But so he could see my parents one last time.

After a long while, I deleted everything I'd wanted to say in the chat box.

In the end, I only typed back, calmly:

"Fine."

"Since you don't have time to come, then you can talk to my consigliere."

……

By the time I'd finished handling my parents' arrangements, it was already the next evening.

I dragged my nearly spent body home, and the second I opened the door, I froze in place.

The living room I'd kept so neat and orderly was now in chaos.

Drawers pulled open, cabinet doors flung wide, clothes and documents scattered across the floor.

Dante Moretti stood at the study doorway, rummaging for something, tossing each thing aside the moment he found it, with no intention of tidying any of it.

As if he'd long grown used to it, that no matter what state he left the house in, someone would always quietly follow behind and clean up after him.

He heard the door and didn't even look up.

"It's the weekend. Where have you been running off to all day?"

"I couldn't even get a hot meal at noon. Had to send a soldier out for delivery."

There was even a note of complaint in his tone.

I stood there, stunned.

So he hadn't come home last night at all.

Of course.

These past two years had always been like this.

When the light in Vittoria Greco's apartment broke, he'd climb out of bed in the middle of the night and rush over to fix it for her.

But he forgot to lock our own door, and a drunk stranger wandered in by mistake.

That night, I huddled in the corner of the bedroom with a dead phone in my hand, too frightened to call anyone, too frightened to sleep with the lights off for a whole month.

When Vittoria's dog was going to give birth, he didn't hesitate to cancel the plan to be with me at my checkup.

He even took a week off from the Family's work in advance to stay by her side.

That was a vet's job.

But in his eyes, her struggling little club always mattered more than my life.

Seeing that I'd gone quiet for so long, Dante finally lifted his head.

When he made out my face, drained pale and bloodless, he visibly froze.

"Why do you look so awful?"

"Is the baby giving you trouble again?"

As he said it, he reached out on instinct to touch my belly.

But I stepped back, dodging his hand.

The air went silent in an instant.

I looked up at him, my voice so calm that even I found it unfamiliar.

"Yesterday, I called you seventy-six times."

"Why didn't you pick up?"

Dante's hand froze in midair.

A few seconds later, he frowned, and his thumb pressed hard into the knuckles of his other hand, scrubbing at clean skin the way he always did when something cornered him.

"Adriana, are you interrogating me?"

"Vittoria and I grew up together. You've always known that, haven't you?"

"That dog isn't just some ordinary pet to her. She raised it from a puppy. It's family to her."

"It was a dangerous birth, and Vittoria was crying her eyes out the whole time. Of course I had to help."

By this point, there was even a trace of impatience in his voice.

"At a time like that, where was I supposed to find the time to take your calls?"

"It's just a checkup, isn't it?"

"Plenty of pregnant women go to the doctor on their own."

"Besides, weren't your parents with you? They've got nothing to do all day anyway. What difference does one missing me make?"

He said it like it was the most natural thing in the world.

As if all of it were perfectly normal.

I looked at him quietly.

And suddenly I wanted to laugh.

So in his eyes, my calls were a nuisance.

My checkup was a checkup that didn't matter.

And even my parents were just those people he wrote off as "got nothing to do anyway."

But he didn't know.

How bad that crash had been.

By the time my father was brought in, he had no vital signs left.

My mother was wheeled into surgery, but the injuries were too severe, and for a while it was touch and go.

The men working on her told me the truth.

Dante was the best the Family had. If he were willing to rush back and open her up himself, there might still be a sliver of hope.

But I called seventy-six times.

Not one got through.

He said he was busy.

Too busy to find time for my calls.

Yet he could message me the instant I liked that post.

Ordering me to delete it.

Terrified Vittoria might misunderstand.

At the thought of it, my heart suddenly ached until it went numb.

So I looked at him and asked, one word at a time:

"Are you really just childhood friends?"

Dante's brow knitted tighter.

"What's that supposed to mean?"

I gazed at this face I'd loved for seven years and suddenly found it utterly unfamiliar.

"Dante."

"I saw you kiss her."

The air froze all at once.

Dante's face shifted slightly.

And I suddenly thought back to yesterday.

At that very restaurant where he'd proposed to me, the one our people kept quiet and private.

The same seat by the window.

The same warm yellow light.

I watched with my own eyes as he lowered his head and kissed Vittoria.

In that moment, I even forgot to breathe.

When I stumbled out into the street, soul-shattered, that scene was all that filled my mind.

That was why I didn't see the motorcycle speeding straight at me.

The rider hit the brakes in time.

But the little life inside me, barely three months along.

In the end, couldn't be saved.

And on that day.

I lost my child.

And I lost my parents, too.