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.

My hands had barely braced against the edge of the bed when the door swung open. Nanette sat in a wheelchair, pushed in by Phoebe.

A blanket draped over her lap, her face drained of color, but her gaze landed squarely on Antonia.

“So this is your sister? You two really do look alike.”

I pulled Antonia behind me on instinct, every nerve on edge.

Nanette touched her own face lightly, then murmured,

“Oliver, I've been feeling dizzy lately. Do you think I never recovered the blood I lost from the accident?”

Oliver bent down to her immediately.

“Where does it hurt?”

Nanette lifted her eyes toward Antonia, a triumphant smile spreading across her face.

“Antonia has Rh-negative blood too, doesn't she? Why not have her give me a little transfusion? Maybe then I won't feel so awful anymore.”

My whole body went rigid. I refused instantly.

“No.”

Oliver frowned.

“Shirley, it's just drawing a small amount of Antonia's blood for a test. Nothing will happen.”

I gripped Antonia's hand so tight my knuckles ached.

“She has a congenital heart condition. You can't draw her blood.”

Nanette's eyes reddened at once.

“Forget it. Don't make things hard for her. My life was never worth much anyway.”

Phoebe stood behind her, glaring at me with the same hostility.

“Mommy, Aunt Nanette isn't asking for a lot. Stop being mean to her!”

I looked at my own daughter. She was still holding the plane tickets Antonia had just handed me, completely unaware that those tickets were my last way out.

The doctor was summoned quickly. He reviewed Antonia's chart, and his expression changed.

“Mr. Gilbert, Miss Winfield has a heart condition. She's not a suitable candidate for blood draws.”

Oliver's voice dropped low：

“It's just a little blood. Nanette is the priority. Take her now.”

The bodyguards moved to drag Antonia from behind me. No matter how hard I fought, it was useless. Finally, I dropped to my knees.

They hit the floor so hard my vision went black.

“I'm begging you, Oliver. Take mine. As much as you want. Just don't touch my sister. She won't survive it.”

Nanette looked down at me from her wheelchair, the corner of her lips curling faintly.

“Shirley, how could you use your own health to guilt Oliver? You know he cares about you more than anyone.”

As she spoke, she clutched her chest and leaned into Oliver's arms.

“Oliver, I feel terrible.”

Something shifted behind his eyes. The flicker of hesitation my pleading had caused froze over completely. He waved his hand, and the bodyguards pinned Antonia into the blood-draw chair.

Her fingertips trembled with fear, but she still shook her head at me.

“It's okay, sis. It's just a little bit.”

The first vial filled. I threw myself forward, clawing past the bodyguards, but they held me back. By the second vial, Antonia's lips had turned purple. When the third needle went in, the cardiac monitor began to shriek.

The doctor shouted,

“Stop! She's going to die!”

But Nanette reached out and caught Oliver's sleeve.

“Oliver, I'm still dizzy. Is it not enough blood?”

I broke free of the bodyguards, half-crawling, half-dragging myself to the foot of her wheelchair, slamming my forehead against the freezing tile over and over.

“Nanette, I'm begging you. If you want revenge, take it out on me.”

“My sister's heart can't take this. She will die.”

Nanette leaned down and spoke in a voice only I could hear.

“Begging won't help. I'm going to make everything you care about disappear.”

The words had barely left her mouth when the monitor behind me flatlined into one long, piercing scream. Antonia's hand slipped off the edge of the chair and hung limp.

The two plane tickets drifted to the floor. Someone stepped on them, leaving a dirty smudge across the paper.

My eyes split with anguish.

“No!”

Half an hour later, the light above the emergency room went dark.

The doctor pulled down his mask. He couldn't look at me.

“I'm sorry.”

I stood there. I couldn't hear anything anymore.

Oliver came back after getting Nanette settled. I was still sitting outside the emergency room.

He was quiet for a moment, then said in a low voice,

“Antonia was already in poor health. Nanette didn't expect this to happen either. I'll make it up to you.”

I slowly lifted my head to look at him.

“Oliver, what are we to you? Me and my sister. What are we?”

His brow creased, like he'd finally lost his patience.

“Shirley, don't start spiraling again.”

I looked down at the plane ticket on the floor, dirty from being stepped on. I laughed, though there was nothing left behind it.

“I understand now.