Kevin:

Once inside the hospital the doctors wheeled away my wife into a room where she is to go into labor. They say it could be hours for her to be like this.

As I wait with Serenity in the room a doctor comes in, breath haggard as he motions for me to come out to the hallway.

The doctor puts a hand on my shoulder and squeezes it, “My boy, your wife doesn’t have long to live. We must deliver this baby now.”

All of a sudden my world began to spin; my ears could hear nothing but the sound of buzzing. I stumbled back into the wall and hold my heart, breathing in and out as deeply as possible.

“I’m sorry, can you say that again?”

The doctor looks at me solemnly, “your wife never mentioned this to you?”

I shake my head dejectedly, “No…not at all.”

I slump to the floor and hold my head in my hands, feeling a force of both betrayal and melancholy.

How could she keep such a thing a secret? I knew I should have taken her hand every chance I had. So many chances, but I was too stupid to think of it as an importance. Now when I look back, how dumb and thoughtless could a person be to not once think to even look at his wife’s wrist?

As the tears stream down my face the doctor taps his foot impatiently, “Please sir I need your approval to go ahead with a C section.”

I nod in consent and rise slowly to my feet, wiping my tear stained cheeks with the back of my hand.

“Do it,” I say as I walk back into the room my wife is in, resting in agony as the labor pains take her over.

I brush my hand through her thin hair and kiss her forehead, “Why did you keep this a secret?” I whisper.

Her brown eyes look into mine as her face contorts with a new wave of pain, “I’m sorry Kevin.” She whispers, “I love you.”

I grasp her hand with a certain roughness, not willing to let her go. But soon the doctor came in with a set of nurses as they began to inject her with medicines made for her comfort. Her hand goes limp in mine as they wheel her away into the surgery room.

The doctor stays behind, fidgeting with something in his hand nervously.

“Look, there’s this…experimentation scientists have been working on. It’s supposed to be able to be used to transfer life spans to another. If you want, before it’s too late…we can test this on you. However it’s still in the testing phase…the results are unknown. We only managed to test on dying rodents.”

He brings up a small cylinder shaped bottle with two ends, a murky blue liquid rests inside it. “This here only needs to be injected from your wrist to hers…If you plan on doing this. You must be in the delivery room.”

I stare shocked; I could save her…my wife. I nod, not wasting another second.

“I’ll do it.” I say taking hold of the bottle, only to have the doctor to keep ahold of it.

“You must be sure…if this ends badly…your daughter could be left an orphan.”

Hesitantly, I think about it again. There’s Henry…and his wife Anna. Even if this doesn’t work, I don’t want to live the rest of my life wondering.

I grab the bottle and head out, the doctor following suit, as he hands me a surgeons mask and gear. We enter the operating room where my wife lays panting and sweating. I brush back the hair from her face, and kiss her long and hard on the mouth, letting all my love and passion into it. Weakly she kisses me back, hardly able to keep her eyes open. As the tears stream down our faces, I grab her right wrist, where her date lays blinking out with her last minutes. I inject the serum to her, and then inject it into mine. Soon I could feel my body begin to convulse as the pain and aches she was feeling flows to me.

I begin to feel sick and weak, soon I have to sit on the floor as I pant and sweat in anguish.

So this is how she was feeling?

I feel so miserable as I realized just how stubborn she was this whole time. Every time she got sick she just waved it off as a cold, and me being the gullible idiot believed her.

“I love you Serenity.” I say, as the sound of a baby’s cry emits throughout the room, I catch a simple glimpse at my new daughter. “I love you Diana…” I whisper and then fall into a dreamless sleep.