Page 38 of The Golden Hour

He treated her cruelly.

He became impatient with her, with her HG, with her asking for him to actually show up.

He had treated the pregnancy like something happening for him, not something happening to her. Like an incubator.

He knew pregnancy clinically. He had treated countless pregnant women for everything under the sun. He had stabilized mothers and their babies long enough to get them up to OB. He had known what to look for with strangers, and he could have recognized preeclampsia even though he wasn’t an obstetrician.

And yet, he failed the one person he should have seen more clearly than anyone. Then, when he saw her on the stretcher, he froze, less than useless; he didn’t help her. He didn’t do anything.

It knocks the air from his lungs again, and the tears sting his eyes.

He didn’t do anything for Honey with this pregnancy.

Not one fucking thing.

The bile swirls in his stomach and threatens to make an appearance. A vicious sob tears from Mason’s throat, ugly and raw and keening. He covers his face with his hands and feels his entire body shake from the sobs ripping his chest open.

Honey.

Oh, Honey.

He thinks of how much pain she has been in. How sick and exhausted and dizzy and afraid she must have felt, and yet the house was always clean. His laundry was always done. Lunch was packed. Dinners were made. The life around him kept functioning because Honey kept forcing herself to function.

For their daughter. For Daisy.

What a fucking asshole he has been to her.

Pushing her until⁠⁠—

“She was leaving you, Mason.”

The images in his brain keep assaulting him—Honey’s glazed face, Honey telling him to save Daisy, Honey’s blood, Honey’s blood, Honey’s blood. His wife. His beautiful, wonderful, sweet, kind wife. His Honey. His everything.

He claws at the scrub fabric over his heart like it will do anything to stop the pain. He feels like he is floating, higher and higher and higher, no longer in his body. Not in control. His chest burns, and he keeps scratching, searching for relief that refuses to come because it knows he does not deserve it.

A sharp smack across the face brings him back down.

That’s when he realizes he’s been hyperventilating, his lips still forming the name over and over even as no sound comes out.

Honey, Honey, Honey.

“Breathe,” Rob orders.

After a few minutes, he feels more in control. He drops his hand from his chest, knowing he’s going to have red scratches there. No less than he deserves. Focusing on box breathing, in, hold, out, hold. He does it until the world stops tilting, till he can take a breath with his lungs only mildly burning.

But just because he feels marginally better, it doesn’t erase the fact that his wife is in the OR having their daughter cut out of her body because she had preeclampsia and he didn’t fucking see it. He feels sick once more when he thinks about that morning with her throwing up, looking so weak and pale, and he had the fucking gall to tell her to keep quiet.

He’s fucking lower than scum.

A useless husband.

A deadbeat father.

The hand on his shoulder tightens and grounds him back to reality. “What the fuck is going on, Mason?”

He takes a few breaths, wiping his nose on the back of his hand. “I don’t know, Dad⁠⁠—”

“Wrong answer,” Rob barks, shaking him once. Hard. “Try again.”