The rain was hitting the ambulance windows in loud, heavy sheets.

Every bump on the Chicago streets sent a sharp, tearing pain through my abdomen.

I kept my hands pressed tight against my swollen stomach, trying to hold the life inside me.

“Stay with us, Hannah,” the paramedic said, squeezing my shoulder.

I could barely see him through the gray haze in my eyes.

The blood on my hands was warm and wet.

The siren wailed above us, a high, screaming sound that seemed to pull me toward the dark.

Then the doors flew open, and the cold night air hit my face.

We were moving fast down a long corridor under bright, buzzing fluorescent lights.

“She is twenty-eight weeks pregnant with twins,” someone yelled near my ear.

“Severe abdominal trauma, heavy vaginal bleeding.”

They pushed me through a set of double doors into a room that smelled of cold steel and bleach.

“Get the on-call trauma surgeon,” a nurse shouted, cutting away my wet clothes.

“We are losing her blood pressure.”

I tried to speak, but my throat was dry and filled with the taste of copper.

My heart hammered against my ribs, loud and frantic on the monitor beside the bed.

The double doors swung open again with a heavy thud.

A tall man walked in, his green scrubs rustling as he moved.

He was snapping on sterile gloves, his face covered by a blue mask.

Only his eyes were visible, dark and sharp under the surgical lights.

My breath caught in my chest.

I knew those eyes.

I had spent three years trying to forget them.

“What do we have?” he asked, his voice deep and commanding.

It was Ethan.

He stepped closer to the table, his eyes dropping to the chart in the nurse’s hand.

Then he looked down at my face.

He stopped moving entirely.

The chart slipped from his fingers and hit the tiled floor with a sharp slap.

“Hannah?” he whispered.

The nurses looked up, their hands pausing over the trays of instruments.

“Doctor, we don’t have time,” one of them said. “She’s hemorrhaging.”

Ethan pulled his mask down, his face pale and tight.