Outside the exam room, the waiting area had returned to its usual rhythm, though curious eyes followed us. Adrian’s bodyguards stood near the exit like two dark columns. His security chief, Luca, gave me a look that was unexpectedly gentle.
“Mrs. Moretti,” he said, then corrected himself. “Elena.”
Adrian noticed the correction. Pain moved across his face, brief and hidden almost immediately.
“I need my bag,” I said. “It’s at my apartment.”
“I’ll have someone get it.”
“No.”
He paused.
“My friend Mara has a key. I’ll call her.”
“Of course.”
The words were simple. The effort behind them was not.
In the ambulance, Adrian rode beside me after asking the paramedics and me both. He filled out no forms, made no demands, and did not once mention his name as if it were currency. He only watched the monitor strapped around my belly, listening to the galloping rhythm of our daughter’s heart.
After a while, he said, “Do you have a name?”
I looked toward the window. Chicago blurred past in winter-gray streaks, all glass, brick, and wet pavement.
“I was thinking Sofia.”
His breath changed.
“That was my mother’s name,” he said.
“I know.”
Silence settled between us, not empty, but crowded with all the things we had failed to say when we still shared a home.
“She would have liked you,” Adrian said.
“Your father didn’t.”
“My father didn’t like anyone who made me human.”
I turned to him. “Is that what I did?”
“For a while.” He looked at the monitor again. “Then I let him convince me it made you unsafe.”
There it was—the shadow behind our marriage.