My First Day at the New Hospital, I Found My Wife in the Delivery Room — With Another Man

The first night after I was transferred to a new hospital for a shift, I ran into Carina Harding, the wife who had claimed she was away on a business trip.

She was lying on a gurney outside the delivery room, visibly pregnant, blood pooling beneath her.

The man kneeling beside her seized my hand in a grip so tight it hurt, his voice raw with desperation.

"Doctor, please, you have to save her!"

A nurse held out the surgical consent form in front of him.

"We need a family member's signature before the procedure. What's your relationship to the patient?"

The man took the pen. Both his hands were shaking as he signed.

"She's my wife."

The words knocked the air out of my chest. What flashed through my mind was the scene from a year ago when Carina had smiled and handed me our marriage certificate.

"Donald Simmons, from today on, we're officially husband and wife."

He must have noticed me freeze, because the man looked up through bloodshot eyes, a flicker of confusion crossing his face.

I ducked my head quickly, adjusting the mask over the bridge of my nose to hide my expression, and turned to push open the operating room doors.

"We'll do everything we can for the patient."

But whatever had existed between Carina and me, I was certain it had just been pronounced dead.

……

After a round of emergency intervention, Carina's condition stabilized. The tension in the operating room eased.

A colleague beside me lowered her voice to gossip.

"I heard these two got a little too... vigorous, and that's what caused all this."

"The woman's practically at her due date and her husband still can't keep his hands off her. Young people these days really do risk their lives for love..."

My hands slowed for a few seconds. What surfaced in my mind was the day Carina had proposed to me, her eyes bright, as if she were ready to pluck a star from the sky and place it in my palm.

"Donald, marry me. For the rest of my life, you'll be the only man I ever touch. I swear it."

Then came our wedding night, and she picked up every piece of clothing I had taken off, putting them back on me one by one. Her face was full of anguish and conflict.

"I'm sorry, Donald."

"I made a vow at my mother's grave to observe three years of mourning for her. This is the third year. Just wait a little longer for me."

I believed her. And the payoff for that belief was the child I was now fighting to deliver, a child that was nearly ready to enter the world.

The corner of my mouth twisted into something bitter.

So the real reason she never touched me wasn't devotion to tradition. It was simply that she never loved me at all.

The surgery wrapped up smoothly. I held the newborn in my arms.

She barely weighed anything, yet the weight on my chest was crushing.

When I pulled the operating room door open, the man waiting outside shot to his feet and rushed over.

His eyes were threaded with red, worry and panic written across every line of his face.

"How's Carina?"

I looked at the man in front of me and recalled the name he had scrawled on the consent form. Percy Henson.

A complete stranger. Carina had never once mentioned him to me.

I placed the baby in his arms and offered my congratulations.

"Mother and daughter are both safe. The surgery went well."

The tension drained visibly from Percy's face, replaced by a gratitude so earnest it stung, directed at a man he didn't know was her actual husband.

He opened his mouth to say something more, but Carina's bed was already being wheeled out from behind me.

"Percy..."

She lay on the bed, utterly spent, pale as paper.

Percy shoved past me and hurried to her side.

Carina stroked the baby with one hand and laced her fingers through Percy's with the other. When she spoke, her voice carried a tenderness I had never once heard directed at me.

"Percy, our baby looks so much like you."

"When she grows up, she's going to be just as handsome as her daddy."