"Don't blame yourself, Winifred..."
Quinn's tear-filled eyes squeezed shut as a violent tremor wracked her body.
"I should be thanking you. You let me see the truth... before my belly got huge, before I had the baby, only to find out he loved someone else all along."
"Quinn, how bad is it?" Winifred hovered her hands over Quinn's stomach, terrified to touch her.
Quinn had just said her leg was bruised and her stomach felt slightly off.
And now, violently shoved into the edge of a solid oak table... the odds were catastrophic.
"Take me to the hospital," Quinn whispered weakly.
"Quinn!"
"I'm bleeding."
Winifred instinctively glanced down, but in a public restaurant, she couldn't exactly check for hemorrhaging. Instead, she grabbed Quinn's wrist to take her pulse.
But Quinn immediately pulled her hand away.
"There's no point," Quinn said, her voice hollow.
Her pale face was soaked in sweat and tears. Her lips quivered uncontrollably, and the tears clinging to her chin finally dropped onto her neck, a visual manifestation of boundless, absolute grief.
Winifred felt like she couldn't breathe.
She shoved both their purses onto her left shoulder, freeing her arms, and scooped Quinn up.
Just as she stepped out of the private room, Stanley, who had run off to chase Huxley, sprinted back.
"Dr. Shultz, give her to me!"
Stanley was a man, and theoretically stronger, so Winifred carefully transferred Quinn into his arms.
But Stanley—who stood five-foot-nine, weighed a hundred and twenty pounds, and suffered from chronic spinal degradation from years of hunching over a keyboard—bent down to take her weight, and the moment he tried to straighten up...
*"Oh my god! My back just snapped!"*
Winifred panicked and grabbed Quinn back, but the clumsy handoff resulted in Quinn temporarily sitting on the floor of the main hallway.
Winifred frantically adjusted her slipping purses, preparing to lift Quinn again, when a deafening, unhinged wail ripped through the corridor.
"Carys?"
"My Carys?!"
"Oh my god! Carys, you finally came back to me!"
Amidst the hysterical screaming, Declan Sutton came sprinting down the hall like a madman.
Everything happened so fast that Winifred barely had time to turn her head before—
*THUD.*
Declan dropped completely to his knees.
With everyone staring in stunned silence, Declan pressed his forehead to the carpet in a desperate, deeply humiliating display of pure devotion.

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