She was holding my hand.
The moment she saw me looking at her, she started crying.
“Oh, thank God,” she whispered.
My lips barely moved.
“The baby?”
María pressed her fingers tighter around mine.
“She’s alive.”
The room blurred.
Alive.
The word entered me slowly, then everywhere.
My daughter was alive.
A sound broke from my chest. It was not a sob, not quite. More like the first breath after being underwater too long.
“She’s tiny,” María said. “Angry. Loud. Perfect.”
“Can I see her?”
“Soon. You lost a lot of blood. They have you in recovery.”
I closed my eyes.
My daughter.
My alive daughter.
For one shining second, joy rose so fiercely it hurt worse than the surgery.
Then I remembered.
“Nicolás?”
María’s expression shifted.
“He saved you.”
I turned my face toward the window.
The sky outside was gray with dawn.
Of course he did.
Of course the story would give him that.
A scalpel, a crisis, a chance to become the hero in the one language he understood.
But saving me under hospital lights did not erase the rain.
“Where is he?” I asked.
“With her.”
My eyes opened.
María lifted a hand quickly. “Not alone. The NICU team is there. He hasn’t left the glass.”
A strange ache moved through me.
I hated him.
I had loved him.
Both truths lay inside me like twins.
Before I could speak, the door opened.
Nicolás stepped in.
He looked older.
Not by years.
By collapse.
His hair was mussed. His coat was gone. Navy scrubs clung to his shoulders. There was a smear of something pale pink and white near his cuff, diluted blood and surgical fluid, the softened evidence of the war my body had fought.
He stopped at the foot of my bed.
For once, he did not command the room.
He asked permission with his silence.
María stood.
“I’ll give you two minutes,” she said, and there was warning in her voice. “Only two.”
When she left, Nicolás looked at me like he did not know what to do with his hands.
That almost broke me.
Those hands had cut me open and held my life together.
Those hands had also thrown my proof across a floor.
“Is she really alive?” I asked.
His face crumpled.
“Yes.”
The word was barely sound.
“She cried before I even cleared her airway,” he said. “The whole room heard her.”
Tears slid into my hair.
“She’s stubborn,” I whispered.
“She has your mouth.”
I almost laughed.
It hurt too much.
He came one step closer.