Please Come Back, My Love novel Chapter 302

hapter 302-

Elena POV

I stared at the glowing screen of my phone. Alexander same burning by his bik

My thumb hovered over the answer button, trembling to violently I nearly dropped ins

Behind me, the operating room doors remained shut, their harsh red light casting everything in a heath for them me they were bleeding.

Lila shifted in my lap, her small hand clutching the fabric of my shirt. She d finally stopped cry betrekking earning som exhausted sleep, but her fingers remained tight, as if some part of her knew that letting go weare losing her gate on sales fent

My finger slid across the screen.

“Alexander,” I said, my voice flat, emotionless. “I’m in New York. I’ve remembered everything

I didn’t wait for his response. I ended the call before he could speak.

The phone slipped from my hand onto the plastic chair beside me, and I turned my gaze back to the operating room doors, to the seemed to pulse in time with my racing heartbeat.

Please, I thought, the prayer formless and desperate. Please don’t let him die.

The irony was bitter. Three years ago, I would have welcomed his death-fantasized about it during those dark hours when his rejective felt crusting Victoria’s mocking smile haunted me, when I’d stared at divorce papers wondering if I’d ever meant anything to him at all.

But now-

Now the thought of losing him felt like someone had reached into my chest and was slowly squeezing my heart until it burst.

I pressed my lips to Lila’s hair, breathing in the familiar scent of her strawberry shampoo mixed with the antiseptic smell of the hospital. The in my arms was the only thing keeping me tethered to reality, the only proof that I hadn’t completely shattered into a thousand irreparable per

He threw himself in front of a knife for me.

The image played on repeat in my mind: Julian’s body moving before his brain could catch up, the way he d positioned himself between me and Victoria like

a human shield, the sick thud of the blade piercing flesh.

The way his eyes had found mine even as he fell, wide with shock and something that looked suspiciously like relief-as if dying to protect me was.

easier than living without me.

God, what did that say about us? About the twisted, broken thing we’d become?

My chest felt tight, like someone had wrapped steel bands around my ribs and was pulling them tighter with each breath. Every minute that ticked by without news felt like an eternity, each second stretching out until I thought I’d go mad from the waiting, from the not knowing, from the terrible. suffocating fear that the last words I’d said to him had been I can’t lose you twice.

Had he heard me? Had he understood what I was really saying-that despite everything, despite the pain and the betrayal and the years of being treated like

backspace

nurakk

2:01 pm

Chapter 3032

OPP

*thless, count part of ace still ended im alive?

The guilt was a Hsing thing inside me, clawing at my throat, making it hard to swallow (shribld have said more should have told hims

What?

That I forgave him? That I understood? That some broken, battered part of my heart still beat for him even after everything had got me yo

I didn’t know. I didn’t know anything anymore except that if he died, if that red light stayed or forever, if those doors never opensed again

I won’t survive it.

The realization hit me like a freight train. I’d survived his cruelty, survived Victoria’s machinations, survived losing our baby arid pumping off a mile and four years of manufactured memories. But wouldn’t survive losing him.

Stop, I told myself viciously. Stop hoping. Hope is what gets you killed.

But I couldn’t stop. Couldn’t turn off the part of my brain that kept replaying every moment from the past few days: the way bed looked at Lila hike the was the most precious thing in the world, the desperate apologies he’d whispered in hospital rooms, the fierce protectiveness in his eyes when he’d irked down that warehouse door.

I love you, he’d mouthed through the oxygen mask.

Or maybe it had been I’m sorry.

Or maybe both.

Maybe it didn’t matter anymore.

“Mommy?” Lila’s voice was small, muffled against my chest. “Is Daddy going to be okay?”

Daddy. She’d called him that so naturally.

“I don’t know, baby,” I whispered, my voice cracking despite my best efforts. “I don’t know.”

The operating room doors burst open.

I was on my feet before I realized I’d moved, Lila clutched against my chest as Dr. Morrison emerged. His scrubs were soaked with blood-so much blood that for a moment I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think, couldn’t do anything but stare at the dark red stains that covered him from chest to knees.

His face was drawn, exhausted, and when his eyes met mine, I saw something in them that made my knees buckle.

No.

“Ms. Vance,” he said, and his voice was gentle, so fucking gentle that I wanted to scream. ‘I’m so sorry. We did everything we could, but-”

The rest of his words dissolved into white noise. I heard them-heard him explaining about the knife piercing the pericardium, about massive internal bleeding, about how Julian’s heart had stopped on the table and they’d worked for over an hour to bring him back-but none of it penetrated the roaring in

my ears.

We did everything we could.

201 pm PP

Chapter 302

*****.

Let der*** *aid when Simeone died. When there was notlong tot to do but plan a fumetal ant pad not a casket and fastest how to meet t wild shoes bus daddy was never coming

home

No. I heard myself say the word rag out strangleh broken be, that’s not hezan! he

The blade missed his heart by 2.3 centimeters, Dr Morrison continued, his voice taking on ‘hat clinical deterred deertors and when detering devastating news. But it pierced the pericardium the sac around the heart. The internal bleedira was catastrophic. By the one we opened huske rhage was over 800 milliliters of blood in the pericardial space?

Numbers. He was giving me numbers like they meant something, like they could explain way foliari Merling was dead

“We performed an emergency pericardiocentesis drained the blood but he’d already gone into hypovolemie shock. Ife blond prestre was undetectable. H heart… Dr. Morrison’s voice caught. “The monitor showed asystole. We worked on him for seventy-three minutes, Ms. Vance We tried everything hest compressions, defibrillation, epinephrine, blood transfusions-but his heart wouldn’t restart. I’m so sorry. Im going to give you and tur senily were the t say goodbye before we-

“Where is he? The question came out flat, dead, “I want to see him.”

Comments

1

Write Comments

< SHARE

2:01 pm ● OP p

Please Come Back. My Lave

hapter 503

Elena POV

*Room 3, he said quietly. Down the hall, second door on the left. Take all the time your need

I didn’t remember walking. Didn’t remember handing Lila off to Ethan or telling him to woep her away, to not let her den.

Then I was standing in the doorway of Room 3, and nothing else mattered.

Julian lay on a gurney in the center of the room, a white sheet pulled up to his chest. His skin was gray,waxy, the viftout life that had always hurted in wom extinguished like someone had flipped a switch.

There was blood-God, so much blood-soaking through the sheet, pooling on the floor beneath be gurney in dark, spreading paddles

But it was his face that broke me.

He looked peaceful. That’s what people always said about the dead, wasn’t it? He looks peaceful. Like death was some kind of blessing, some merciful release from the pain of living.

Fuck that.

Julian Sterling didn’t look peaceful. He looked gone. Empty. Like everything that had made him him-the arrogance, the cruelty, the desperate, aching vulnerability he’d tried so hard to hide had been scooped out, leaving nothing but a shell.

I don’t remember crossing the room. Don’t remember my legs giving out or my knees hitting the blood-slicked floor. But suddenly I was there, my hands on his chest, feeling for a heartbeat that would never come.

“No,” I whispered. Then louder: “No.”

His skin was still warm. That’s what killed me-he was still warm, like he’d just fallen asleep, like any second he’d open those storm-gray eyes and smirk at me and say something cruel and cutting that would make me want to slap him.

But he didn’t move. Didn’t breathe. Didn’t do anything but lie there like a broken doll while I fell apart on top of him.

“You bastard,” I choked out, my hands fisting in the blood-soaked sheet. “You fucking bastard. You don’t get to do this. You don’t get to-to throw yourself in front of a knife and then just die on me. That’s not-you can’t—”

r

The words dissolved into sobs so violent they shook my entire body. I collapsed forward, pressing my face against his chest, breathing in the scent of him

beneath the copper tang of blood-pipe tobacco and peppermint and something uniquely Julian that I’d never been able to name.

“You bullied me for three years,” I said into his chest, my voice muffled and broken. “You made my life hell. You chose her over me every single time. You made me feel like I was nothing, like I didn’t matter, like I was just-just some thing you could use and discard whenever you got bored. And now you be just going to leave? Just like that? Without giving me a chance to-to-”

To what? Yell at him? Forgive him? Make him grovel and apologize for every cruel word, every cold dismissal, every time he’d made me feel like loving him was the stupidest thing I’d ever done?

“It’s not fair,” I whispered. “You owe me, Julian Sterling. You owe me so much. I should have-God, I was so stupid. When we divorced, I should have taken everything. Should have demanded the penthouse and the beach house and that ridiculous estate in the Hamptons. Should have asked for millions- no. billions-in compensation for what you put me through,”

backspace

2:01 pm PP