I stood beside her coffin, trying to stay strong as my hands trembled, knowing our unborn child rested within her—when a sudden movement from her belly shattered the silence, turning grief into shock as cries for doctors erupted around me.

For her.

For the baby.

Except there was no baby anymore.

At least, that’s what they had told me.

“My name is Ethan Cole,” I remember thinking, as if saying it silently might anchor me to something real. “I’m thirty-two years old. I am a husband.”

The word husband felt strange in that moment. Not wrong. Just… incomplete.