Chapter 2 - THE CALL THAT CHANGED EVERYTHING
“What do you mean, emergency contact?” The phone felt heavy against my ear, the bustling sounds of downtown Chicago fading into a dull, senseless drone. I gripped my steering wheel, knuckles turning white. “I’m her ex-husband. We haven’t been married for three years.”
“Mr. Miller,” the nurse’s voice was steady but laced with a grim urgency. “I’m calling from Jackson Memorial in Miami. Sarah Sanders was brought in two hours ago. She explicitly listed you on her updated intake forms just weeks ago. She’s in the ICU, sir. There was an altercation. She’s sustained severe trauma, and she’s slipping in and out of consciousness. The only name she’s asked for is yours.”
My blood ran ice cold. An altercation? The memory of that small, terrifying bloodstain on the white hotel sheets violently ripped its way back to the front of my mind. It hadn’t been an illness. It hadn't been a random health scare. Someone had already hurt her before she even walked into that beachfront bar.
I didn't go back to the office. I drove straight to O’Hare, abandoning my car in the short-term lot and buying the first available ticket to Miami. The flight was an agonizing blur of turbulence and mounting dread. I kept replaying our night together. Her forced smiles. The way she had kept her back to the wall. The frantic, terrified look in her eyes when the sunlight hit that drop of blood. She hadn't been leaving our past behind in Miami. She had been running from something.
When I burst through the doors of Jackson Memorial, the sterile smell of bleach hit me like a physical blow. A grim-faced doctor met me in the ICU waiting room. He didn’t offer comforting platitudes. He explained that Sarah had been found in an alley behind the luxury resort she managed, suffering from a concussive blow to the head and a deep laceration to her abdomen—a wound that appeared to have reopened an older, partially healed knife wound.
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“She was stabbed weeks ago,” the doctor said, flipping through her chart. “She never sought professional medical treatment for the initial injury. It was poorly stitched. Whoever attacked her today knew exactly where she was already vulnerable.”
I staggered back, the breath knocked out of my lungs. The night in the hotel. She had been bleeding. She had spent the entire night in my arms, hiding a stab wound, protecting me from whatever nightmare she was trapped in.
