Oliver slammed the box shut. His voice came out razor-sharp, vicious.

“Shirley, you've really outdone yourself. You won't even keep what your own daughter made for you?”

I kept my eyes closed.

“No need.”

His chest heaved, as if those two words had finally cut deep enough to draw blood.

“Fine. Fine! This is how you treat our daughter!”

“Since that's how it is, don't bother showing up for Phoebe's dance rehearsal tomorrow. Nanette will be there for her.”

He stared at me, waiting for me to crumble, to lash out, to beg him with red-rimmed eyes the way I always used to, pleading with him not to give my place away.

But all I said was,

“Fine.”

The anger on Oliver's face froze solid.

Right on cue, his phone rang. Nanette's name lit up the screen. Her voice came through in broken sobs.

“Oliver, did I upset Shirley again?”

Oliver looked at me, silent for a few seconds, then turned and walked toward the door.

“No. She's just being unreasonable.”

After the door closed, the room went quiet. A nurse came in with reddened eyes and started redressing my wounds.

I looked at the freshly opened glass medicine bottle sitting on the tray and said softly：

“Could you pull the curtain? The light's too harsh.”

The moment the nurse turned around, I grabbed the bottle and smashed it against the bed rail.

Glass exploded with a sound sharp enough to split eardrums.

By the time the nurse screamed and spun back, I had already picked up the largest shard and pressed it to the side of my throat.

This time, I didn't hesitate.

Every drop of color drained from Oliver's face. He seized my hand. The glass shard dragged across my palm as he wrenched it away, and blood ran down through the gaps between his fingers.

“Shirley! Do you have to die right in front of me before you're satisfied?!”

He pinned me down so hard I couldn't move.

The nurse was shouting for help. A doctor burst in with a crash cart. The room dissolved into chaos.

I looked into Oliver's bloodshot eyes and felt nothing but the absurdity of it all.

He had already chosen Nanette. What was the point of playing the devoted husband now?

When I woke again, it was already the next afternoon.

Oliver wasn't in the room. Only Phoebe stood beside the bed.

She wore a pink dance dress, her hair done up in two little buns, a registration form clutched in her hand.

The moment she saw my eyes open, she rushed over, her small face scrunched up, her voice a petulant whine.

“Mom, can you please stop staying in the hospital?”

I blinked, caught off guard. She pulled the form closer to her chest, her voice turning even more aggrieved：

“The rehearsal for the parent-child dance is tomorrow. The teacher said a mom has to be there.”

“But you keep lying around in the hospital, and Dad won't come home, and Aunt Nanette cried all night.”

“Everyone's unhappy because of you. You're going to ruin my dance too.”

I looked at this little girl who carried the same blood in her veins as mine, and still, pathetically, tried to tell myself that maybe she was just scared.

After all, she had watched the doctors draw blood from me that night with her own eyes.

My voice was so hoarse it barely came out.

“Phoebe, that night when they took Mommy's blood, were you scared?”

Phoebe's eyes reddened slightly.

“Yes.”

Something stirred faintly in my chest.

Then, a second later, she lowered her head and fidgeted with the hem of her skirt.

“All the nurses were running around, and Daddy was really scary.”

“Aunt Nanette kept holding Daddy's hand. She was hurting so bad she couldn't even cry.”

“Mommy, you're a grownup. Can't you just let her have it?”

I stared at her, frozen. Tears hit the back of my hand before I even realized I was crying.

So in my daughter's heart, no amount of suffering I endured could compare to a single whimper from Nanette.

Phoebe held the registration form out to me.

“Aunt Nanette said she could take your place and dance with me. She said you're not well enough, and you'd only hold me back if you came.”

I looked down.

In the column labeled "Mother," Nanette Harding's name was written in bold, unmistakable letters.

My fingers went rigid against the blanket. Phoebe seemed to sense my reaction and added in a small, guilty voice,

“Aunt Nanette is a really good dancer. She said she'd help me win first place.”

I remembered, suddenly, the first time Phoebe learned to dance at four years old. She'd fallen and bruised both knees, then threw herself into my arms crying, saying she only ever wanted Mommy to be with her.

I'd held her for a long time that day, rocking her until the tears stopped.

But now she was the one who'd crossed my name out with her own hands. I pushed the registration form back toward her.

“Then let her be the one to go with you from now on.”

Phoebe froze.

“Mom, don't be like this again. Aunt Nanette says you're always saying things just to make people feel bad.”

Footsteps sounded at the door. Oliver walked in, catching the tail end of that sentence.

He took one look at Phoebe's reddened eyes and his brow furrowed immediately.

“Shirley, she's seven years old. Do you really have to pick fights with a child?”

I said nothing. Phoebe ducked behind him and whispered,

“Daddy, does Mommy not want me anymore?”

Oliver's expression turned ice-cold.

“Shirley, are you done? If you hadn't blown everything out of proportion, Phoebe never would've asked Nanette to do the parent-child dance recital! You have no one to blame but yourself!”

Father and daughter stood together, one in front of the other. One thought I was being unreasonable. The other thought I was holding her back.

In that single moment, the last scrap of warmth left inside me vanished completely. I closed my eyes, too exhausted to fight, and let their voices crash around me without answering a single word.

I waited until deep into the night, when the nurse on duty thought I was asleep. Then I pulled the IV needle from my arm and followed the emergency stairwell up to the roof.

The hospital rooftop housed a plasma cold-storage unit. The temperature around it was brutal. I'd just lost blood, and my clotting disorder meant that if I stayed long enough, no one would be able to save me.

Cold air seeped through the gap beneath the door. I sat outside the storage room, slowly unwinding the gauze from my wrist. Blood welled up almost immediately, and the freezing wind turned the sting into something raw and biting.

The system alert chimed again.

“Life signs continuing to decline.”

I closed my eyes. For the first time, I felt at peace.

But after some unknowable stretch of time, frantic footsteps echoed from the far end of the corridor.

Oliver came rushing toward me. He scooped me up in his arms, his whole body shaking, yet even then the first words out of his mouth were blame.

“Shirley! Do you have to pull something like this right before Phoebe's rehearsal?”

He carried me back to the room. The doctor was already waiting at the door.

A space heater was wheeled to the bedside. A nurse cut away the gauze that had frozen stiff with blood, and their faces grew grimmer with every layer.

“Her core temperature is dangerously low. Possible hypothermic tissue damage.”

“Blood pressure is still dropping. Push the reversal meds now!”

“Mr. Gilbert, any later and your wife might have——”

Oliver whipped around so fast the doctor swallowed the rest of the sentence.

His fingers were clenched around my chart, knuckles white.

“Save her. Shirley can't leave me. She's pulled through every crisis before on her own, and this time is no different!”

No one in the room dared respond.

I lay on the bed, listening to the monitors beep one pulse at a time, while images from years ago drifted up before my eyes.

Back then, no one called Oliver "Mr. Gilbert."

He was just the least-regarded youngest son of the Gilbert family, wearing a lab coat washed so many times it had gone gray, clutching a stack of rejected project proposals, smoking by the hospital's back entrance.

I asked him if he truly wanted to keep chasing his dream of being a doctor. With his family background, all he had to do was give up medicine and go home to take over the business. He didn't have to suffer like this.

He looked up at me, eyes full of exhaustion.

“I do. But no one believes in me.”

I respected him. I admired him. I stayed up with him revising proposals page by page, ran around with him chasing investors, stood with him in the rain for three hours just to get a meeting with one potential backer.

Back then, the system points I'd been accumulating were nearly enough to send me home, back to my original world.

But the night Oliver landed his first round of funding, he held me in our tiny rental apartment and cried.

He said,

“Shirley, I swear I'll give you a good life someday.”

My heart softened. I traded my points for the data models and clinical databases he needed most.

On the hospital's opening day, Oliver took my hand in front of everyone.

“Without Shirley, I wouldn't be standing here today.”

I thought I'd finally found a home.

So even when the doctors urged me more than once to terminate the pregnancy,

“You have Rh-negative blood and a clotting disorder. The risk of delivery is far too high.”

Even when the system warned me,

“Host has accumulated sufficient points. Departure from this world is available.”

I pressed my hand to my belly and couldn't bring myself to leave. Not the baby. Not the man I loved. I chose to stay.

Then the day came. The pain blackened my vision. Oliver was supposed to be right outside the delivery room, but Nanette had just flown back into the country.

She was crying on the phone, saying someone had followed her at the airport and she was so scared she could barely breathe.

Oliver left without hesitation. Before he went, he squeezed my hand.

“Shirley, I'll be right back.”

"Right back" turned into the entire night.

I hemorrhaged on the delivery table. The nurses' voices pitched into panic：

“Where's the backup Rh-negative blood?”

“It was just transferred out!”

“Who authorized the transfer?”

No one answered.

I was in too much pain to speak. All I could hear was the system alerting me, over and over, that my life signs were dropping.

In the end, I spent every last point I had to buy Phoebe her first cry.

When I woke, Oliver was kneeling at my bedside with the baby in his arms, tears streaming down his face as he apologized.

“Shirley, I owe you my life.”

A hushed argument outside the hospital room door pulled me back from the memory.

The doctor held a report in his hands, his voice tight.

“Mr. Gilbert, your wife cannot withstand any more stress. Her clotting levels are already in the danger zone, and her body has no room left to recover.”

Oliver was silent for a moment.

“She'll be fine. She's pulled through worse than this before.”

The doctor lost his composure.

“Before was before! Ever since she gave birth, her health has been in steady decline. If she keeps being pushed like this, it won't matter who you bring in. No one on earth will be able to save her!”

The words had barely settled when Oliver's phone rang.

Conflict played across his face for a long time, but in the end, he answered.

A soft, fragile sob came through the line.

“Oliver, I dreamed about the car accident again. There was so much blood. I'm so scared.”

Oliver turned and walked out without a second of hesitation.

“I'm on my way.”

The doctor stood rooted in place. His mouth opened, then closed. He didn't try to stop him again.

The hospital room went quiet.

Some time later, Oliver came back. He set a photograph on the pillow beside me.

In it, my sister Antonia Winfield stood outside her school gate, wearing a jacket that had been washed so many times it was nearly white. She smiled at the camera, careful, tentative.

My fingers curled tight. Oliver watched me, and his tone softened just slightly.

“Antonia's been wanting to see you. Shirley, stop doing this to yourself.”

“Once Nanette's feeling more stable, I'll have someone bring Antonia here so you two can be together again.”

When Antonia arrived, she was clutching two plane tickets in her hand.

She was thinner than she'd looked in the photograph. Her face was so pale it was almost translucent, and every few steps she had to brace herself against the wall.

But the moment she saw me, she smiled.

“Shirley, I already bought the tickets. Let's go.”

“I'm done with school. I'm done with treatments. I'm taking you home.”

Something lodged in my throat and wouldn't come loose.

For the first time in all those days, I wanted to sit up.