Years of Tangled Ties

1 It was the second year of Jason’s supposed return to our family, two years after I’d first discovered his affair. The shattered bones in my right hand, the hand of a surgeon, had finally started to knit back together. I was cleared for duty, back within the sterile, familiar walls of Metropolitan General Hospital. But on my very first day back, I ran into her. Bella. The woman who had fractured my marriage. She was lowering herself awkwardly from an ultrasound table, her belly swollen, ripe with a full-term pregnancy. The moment the curtain was pulled aside, my eyes locked with Jason’s. His hand, steadying Bella, froze for a fraction of a second. His gaze darted away, unable to meet mine. Without a word, I turned and walked out. I went straight to the admissions desk and scheduled a procedure for myself. Termination of an early-stage pregnancy. This twisted, tangled mess of years… it was time to finally cut the cord. … I stood there, a statue in a white coat, my chest tightening until I could barely breathe. My mind was a blizzard of white noise. My first instinct was to flee, but Jason’s voice, sharp and loud, stopped me in my tracks. “Ava!” At the sound of my name, Bella let out a startled cry and crumpled to the floor. “Jason… something’s wrong… my stomach…” The hand he’d started to reach out to me snapped back. He rushed to her side, all frantic concern. I watched, a cold, detached observer in my own life’s wreckage. “What kind of doctor just stands there?” a voice muttered from the growing crowd. “Look at her, frozen like a statue. A pregnant woman is on the floor, and she’s not lifting a finger.” The commotion drew a small crowd, phones already emerging to capture the drama. Jason shielded Bella with his body, her pale, tear-streaked face pressed against his back. “Ava… it’s not what you think… I didn’t…” he started, his voice a low plea. Bella peeked around him, her eyes wide with feigned innocence. “Dr. Ross, it wasn’t his fault, I swear. It was me. I couldn’t leave him alone. Please… don’t blame him, please?” A sharp pain lanced through my head, but with it came a chilling clarity. I walked toward them, each step deliberate, and slapped her across the face. The sound was a clean, sharp crack in the hospital corridor. “Is screwing another woman’s husband some kind of addiction for you, Bella?” I asked, my voice dripping with the venom I’d suppressed for years. She staggered, grabbing my hand, refusing to let go, her lips forming pleas for forgiveness. That’s when Jason finally snapped. He yanked me away from her and shoved me, hard. I slammed onto the cold, unforgiving tile floor. “Ava! Have you lost your mind? Can’t you see she’s pregnant, about to give birth?!” he roared, his face a mask of fury. “Where’s your humanity? Where’s your goddamn compassion? The baby is innocent!” My head hit the ground with a sickening thud, the world ringing in my ears. Warm blood trickled from my forehead, catching in my eyelashes, staining my vision crimson. But the years of hatred and rage coalesced into a single, burning point of focus. I gritted my teeth, pushing myself up. “You want to talk about time and place?” I spat, the words tasting of blood. “Did you think about ‘time and place’ when you were tearing the clothes off this slut? Did you think about my feelings every time you swore you’d changed, every time you promised our family came first?” I staggered to my feet, a phantom ache flaring up in my right hand, the one he had already broken. This sham of a marriage should have ended long ago. It should have ended three years ago. The day he shoved me down a flight of stairs—costing me our first child—just so Bella could steal the credit for my research paper. It should have ended when he used my ruined hand as leverage, forcing me to perform surgery on Bella’s mother. It should have ended when he desecrated my parents’ final resting place, scattering their ashes to the wind just to get me to pull some strings for her mother. I remembered the surgeon’s words after my tenth operation, the phrase seared into my memory. “I’m sorry, Dr. Ross. It’s highly unlikely you’ll ever hold a scalpel again.” I should have filed for divorce right then, in the depths of that living hell. I regret not doing it sooner. My whole body trembled. My back, my chest, and now a dull, heavy ache in my lower abdomen. The sight of me, bloodied and shaking, seemed to finally penetrate Jason’s rage. He reached a hand out, then let it hover in the air, uncertain. He couldn’t look me in the eye. His tone softened, an old, familiar attempt to placate me. “Ava… why do you have to be like this… so… dramatic?” “I promise you,” he said, his voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper. “Once the baby is born, I’ll never see her again. Okay?” “It’s my fault. I just… I didn’t know you’d be at the hospital today.” He knelt, trying to help me up. The guilt in his eyes looked almost real, but Bella’s staged sobs in the background were a constant, grating reminder of the truth. He had cheated. Again. My right hand drifted to my stomach, a sudden, damp warmth spreading through my clothes. He didn’t know. The next patient scheduled for an ultrasound was me. It was my fault. My fault for believing a man like him could ever change. My fault for being so foolish as to conceive a child in the ruins of our life. Tears I didn’t know I was holding back streamed down my face. “We’re getting a divorce,” I said, my voice hollow. “And you will leave with nothing.” Meeting Jason had been an accident. His family’s empire had crumbled overnight, leaving him with nothing but his parents’ debts. He’d been stabbed by loan sharks, left for dead in a filthy alley, crawling his way onto the street when I found him. No one in the city would touch him. No one dared. But I was a doctor. My oath was to save lives. So I saved his. He called me his savior, the only light in his world. And then, with the life I’d given back to him, he rebuilt everything, creating a new empire from the ashes of the old one. When I wanted flowers, the entire hospital would be filled with them the next day. When I wanted love, he tattooed my name over his heart and filled the sky with drones spelling out his devotion for 520 consecutive days. When I wanted his time, he dropped everything, cancelled meetings, even skipped the anniversary of his parents’ deaths. Then came a car accident. Bella became his private nurse. And somehow, she moved from his hospital room right into his heart. Betrayal was just that simple. When I first found out, he fell to his knees before me. “Ava, she looks so much like you. I was coming out of anesthesia… I thought she was you!” Their on-again, off-again affair dragged on for a year. It started with secret meetings in hospital rooms after faked injuries and escalated to him bringing her into our home. It all came to a head when security footage caught her pushing me from a second-story balcony. I was five months pregnant. I lost the baby. Bella went to jail. And Jason, finally, came back to me. Or so I thought. It was clear now they’d never really been apart. … After scheduling the abortion, I left. It took a long time sitting in my car in the parking garage to still the shaking in my hands. Finally, I picked up my phone and called my lawyer. “Cole, that divorce petition you drafted for me last year? Let’s proceed.” “The grounds are the same. Adultery. We can prove cohabitation. And per the postnup he signed, I want everything. I want every single dollar he spent on his mistress back.” “Have the papers on my desk in three days.” As the car wound its way out of the garage, the cramping in my abdomen grew sharper, a relentless tide of pain. Maybe I wouldn’t need the surgery after all. Maybe this tiny, unformed life was already slipping away. I looked up just in time to see headlights. A deafening roar of metal on metal. The airbag exploded against me, but the force of the impact was too great. I was thrown from the car. “Help… someone…” I gasped, the world spinning. Before the shock could even register, another car, a pearl-white sedan, screeched to a halt, its tire inches from my head. My terror was a beat too slow. The car lurched forward. The tire rolled directly over my right hand. “AHHH!” The agony was instantaneous, absolute. I curled into a ball, but through a haze of pain, I saw her face in the driver’s seat. Bella. Her expression was a mask of triumphant fury. Her lips formed two words. “I win.” … I was bundled onto a stretcher like a broken doll, rushed from the ambulance to the OR. Through the fog, I could hear a frantic, weeping voice. “Jason… what do I do? What do I do?” “I was just trying to catch up to her! I just wanted to explain!” “I’ve screwed up so bad! Jason, you’ll protect me, won’t you?” “Jason, I can’t go back to jail! Our baby can’t grow up without a mother! Save me!” And then, cutting through the wail of the sirens and Bella’s desperate sobs, I heard Jason’s voice, deep and steady. “Don’t worry.” “I’ll handle everything.” For a moment, the physical pain vanished, replaced by the chilling echo of those two sentences. Jason. All these years… what a fucking joke. My life flashed before my eyes, a chaotic, nonsensical nightmare. But the cold sting of the anesthetic and the glint of the scalpel told me this was real. This was just one more cross I had to bear. “I’m sorry, Dr. Ross,” the surgeon told me later. “The chances of you regaining enough function to operate are now virtually zero. We’ll have to discuss alternative positions for you at the hospital.” “And… about the pregnancy… the trauma from the impact was too severe…” Before he could finish, Jason walked in, holding two documents. One was a liability waiver. The other was a statement, promising I would not press charges against Bella. I stared up at him, a sense of profound absurdity washing over me. I was fresh out of surgery, and he was already here, running interference for the woman who tried to kill me. He didn’t even have to speak. I snatched the papers from his hand and, ignoring the searing pain, tore them into confetti. “She did this to me, Jason! She deserves to pay for what she’s done!” “You want me to just let it go? Not a chance in hell!” I watched his expression shift from annoyance to cold, hard authority. His hand cracked across my face. The IV stand beside me wobbled and crashed to the floor. “Ava, why can’t you ever learn?” he snarled. “Bella has already apologized. Why can’t you just leave her alone?!” “She’s already been to prison once because of you! Are you trying to destroy her completely!?” “Do you have any decency? Any empathy?” “You’re just like them,” he spat, his voice filled with a sudden, chilling venom. “You’re just like the loan sharks who left me for dead in that alley. So self-righteous. So determined to burn everything to the ground.” I snapped. The last thread of my sanity broke. A year ago, after I’d saved his life, I’d been harassed by his creditors, kidnapped three times, and once, almost gang-raped. I had risked everything for him. And now he was comparing me to them. I launched myself at him, grabbing a shard of the broken IV bottle and swinging it at his head. But he was too strong. He caught my wrist, twisted my arm, and slammed me against the wall, his hand closing around my throat. “Your hand is already useless,” he hissed, his face inches from mine. “You have no future as a surgeon.” “Let Bella go, and I won’t divorce you.” Security guards, nurses, and Bella herself rushed into the room, drawn by the commotion. Bella threw herself into Jason’s arms, sobbing. “Jason… don’t fight. Please don’t fight because of me. It’s not fair to me, it’s not fair to our baby!” Her crying grew more frantic, more hysterical. “I’ll go,” she wailed. “I’ll leave. I’ll disappear from your life forever. I’ll raise the baby on my own, I won’t take a single cent from you, just please, please don’t fight with her, don’t divorce her…” Whether it was a performance or a genuine breakdown, I couldn’t tell. Suddenly, she dropped to the floor and began slamming her head against the tiles, the rhythmic thudding echoing in the tense silence. Jason’s resolve crumbled. He looked completely undone. With a choked cry, he grabbed a piece of the shattered glass from the floor. He gritted his teeth, and in one swift, horrifying motion, he slashed his own arm, severing a tendon. Blood sprayed across the white walls, a constellation of crimson. The room erupted in chaos. “Ava,” he gasped, clutching his bleeding arm. “Bella’s mistakes… I’ll pay for them. I’ll carry her burden.” “But I will not let you hurt her again!” For a second, I was lost in a memory, the image of him shielding me from harm two years ago overlapping with the monster standing before me. I stared blankly at the scene. A nurse shrieked. A pool of blood was spreading on the floor beneath Bella. The call button buzzed incessantly. Bella was screaming, clutching her stomach. Jason, panicked and on the verge of becoming a father, was shouting for help. The room felt like a scene from hell, a cacophony of pain and fear. A gurney finally arrived and wheeled Bella away, leaving my room in a sudden, ringing silence. It was a relief. Except for Jason’s parting threat, thrown over his shoulder as he left. “If anything happens to Bella or my child, I swear to God, you will pay!” Through the light slanting in from the hallway, his face was a blur of rage. My own bandages were already soaked through with fresh blood. A doctor rushed in, his face grim. He said I needed a second surgery, immediately. As the anesthetic began to work its magic, my mind drifted back to the last time our marriage had shattered. Just after they’d released me from the psychiatric hospital Jason had committed me to. I remembered standing in the bright, sterile living room of our villa, feeling small and fragile. “Ava, dear, just apologize to Jason, and he’ll apologize to you. Then we can all put this behind us,” my mother had said, casually admiring an expensive gift he had bought her. Jason stood by the window, tapping ash from a cigarette. “Ava, I was wrong. I sent Bella overseas. I swear I’ll never have contact with her again.” He slid a document across the table. “This is my guarantee to you. If I ever cheat again, everything I own becomes yours. Just be good now, okay?” I had hesitated. Maybe it was because I still loved him. Maybe it was the terror of being sent back to that place. In the end, I agreed. I chose to try and salvage what was left of our broken marriage. … The second surgery was quick. The moment I was wheeled out of the OR, a shadow fell over me. It was Jason. He grabbed my newly bandaged right hand and hauled me up from the gurney. His face was contorted with a rage that bordered on madness. “Ava!” he roared. “Why can’t you ever learn? Why did you get to have your surgery before Bella?” “It’s your fault! You caused her to go into premature labor! It’s your fault there’s something wrong with my baby!” The pain was so intense I couldn’t even scream. Cold sweat drenched my body. “Ja…son!” I gasped. “Let me go!” I struggled against his grip, but it was useless. There was a sickening snap. I felt the fragile bones in my hand give way, my wrist bending at an unnatural, ninety-degree angle. “Do you have any idea what you’ve done? My baby—our baby—is in the NICU!” he bellowed. “If it weren’t for you, none of this would have happened!” He dragged me off the gurney and began slapping me, over and over. The hospital corridor was full of people, but no one moved. No one dared to intervene. I started to laugh. A raw, gurgling sound. My mouth filled with blood, spilling from my lips and gums. The sound was horrifying, inhuman. A true vision of hell. My laughter seemed to startle him. His face twisted in disgust. “You’re pathetic! You’re completely insane!” After one final, ringing slap, a nurse came rushing up to him. “Mr. Croft, your baby is type AB. The mother is type A. We need to test your blood type. The blood bank is critically low, and the baby is in danger!” Jason, still breathing heavily from his assault, froze. The color drained from his face. “I’m… I’m O-negative.”