My Husband Defended His Mistress Against Me in Public

I turned thirty-four at 6:47 in the morning, somewhere between a fetal heart rate that kept dipping and a patient's chart I'd been staring at for the last twenty minutes without really seeing it.

No one mentioned it. Why would they? The ward doesn't stop for birthdays.

I checked my phone during a two-minute break by the nurses' station. One notification. A calendar reminder. The kind that auto-generates and fires without anyone having to think about it. Tristan had set it three years ago, back when we still did things like set reminders for each other.

Three seconds. I gave myself three seconds of feeling whatever that was—disappointment, mostly, dressed up as nothing—and then I pressed my fingertips together, the way I always do when I need to reset, and went back to work.

I was thirty-four years old and I had been awake for thirty-four hours. That felt like some kind of joke.

I'm an OB-GYN attending at Mercy General. One of the better hospitals in New York, which means one of the better hospitals in the country, which means the cases are harder and the hours are longer and the stakes feel permanently, physically real in a way that doesn't let you forget. I trained under Dr. Eleanor Whitmore, who is probably the best surgical mentor I've ever seen and who is now running a fellowship program in London that I have absolutely no business thinking about at six forty-seven in the morning on hour thirty-four of a shift.

I stopped thinking about it.

I had two patients in active labor, one complicated third-trimester case in monitoring, and a preterm delivery consult waiting. I had skipped lunch and dinner. My coffee was cold on the counter for the second time that morning because I kept forgetting to drink it.

I was almost out. Two hours left on the shift. I was thinking about my bed—specifically the left side of it, which was mine, which was reliably empty by the time I got home from nights like this—when Diana caught me in the corridor.

Diana Chen, our charge nurse. She has a particular expression she saves for moments right before things get bad. That was the expression she was wearing.

"Room 7 is asking for the doctor in charge," she said, which both of us knew meant something had already escalated past the point where 'asking' was the right word.

Paulina Perez was in Room 7.

She'd been admitted four days ago. Twenty-eight weeks, high-risk pregnancy, a history of refusing every screening and protocol I'd recommended since she'd first come into my clinic three months back. No genetic panels. No detailed anatomy scan. She'd waved off the gestational diabetes test, cited 'philosophical objections' to what she called 'problem-hunting.' Every conversation had been its own small battle.

I walked in and she was sitting upright in the bed, arms crossed, eyes already burning. There was a second-year resident in the corner with the look of someone who had been hoping