Page 22 of The Golden Hour

“You’re doing the right thing,” Melissa tells Honey with a gentle smile.

“Leaving?” Honey asks.

Melissa shakes her head.

“You are protecting your daughter. And yourself.”

With one final smile, Melissa heads down the hallway to the bedroom to pack Honey’s clothes. Honey glances around the nursery, her dream nursery for her daughter, with its various shades of gold, bumblebees and sweet little trinkets, dark wood furniture, and a honeycomb rug.

These are just things.

Her daughter is not.

Her daughter is precious and vulnerable and relies on Honey to keep her safe, to keep her heart safe. And Honey will be damned if her father is the first person to break it.

Another contraction hits, and she closes her eyes to breathe. The worst of it passes, and Honey frowns when she feels wetness between her legs, thinking for one mortifying second that she just lost control of her bladder. Not the first time it’s happened.

“Great,” she mutters, wincing as she uses the armrests to push herself from the chair. When she glances down at her sundress, she freezes.

There’s a rush of red running down her legs to the cream carpet.

Her breath catches in her throat, and her entire body goes cold. All she can focus on is the vivid red against her too-pale skin, the floaty sensation in her pounding head, and the sharp pain in her stomach.

Honey reaches down and brushes her hand against the blood, hoping that maybe it’s not real, just her imagination. That her mind is playing some awful, cruel trick on her.

But her hand is red.

And when she glances over her shoulder, the gold cushion of the rocking chair is red too.

Instinct causes her to press a hand to her belly, and she silently begs for Daisy to move, to wiggle, to kick and break her ribs—anything.

Daisy is still, and fear grips Honey’s heart.

“Honey, did you want me to pack⁠⁠—”

Melissa freezes in the doorway when she sees her daughter. Honey sways in place, feeling like a child again as she looks to her mother for help.

“Mommy?”

The world tilts, and before everything goes black, she hears her mother shriek.

“Honey!”

CHAPTER SIX

MASON

“That’s how you do it,” Mason says, tossing his gloves into the bin like he’s sinking a jump shot.

He turns toward nurses Parker and Susan, both twenty-year veterans with no patience for his nonsense, as evident when they roll their eyes at him.

“Boom.”

Satisfaction rolls down his back as he watches his stable patient being rolled down the hallway, heading toward the elevator to bring him up to surgery. He shares a grin with Dr. Lowell, a second-year resident, and fist-bumps him.

“That was awesome, Dr. Carpenter,” Lowell gushes.

Mason feels that satisfaction only build.