Still, her words unsettled him. “Do you think she still clings to hope?” Carol asked. “You were her whole world.”
“I… don’t know,” Curtis whispered, reaching for another drink to drown the unease.
At the clinic, Laura pressed forward with steady resolve. She signed the consent, took a breath, and closed the file. This was her future. Hormone treatments started, and with them a sense of renewal. She wasn’t looking back.
Curtis, oblivious, celebrated what he thought was success. Whenever doubt crept in, he silenced it with whiskey, comforted by Carol’s promise: “Soon you’ll have a child of your own.”
One morning, a cream-colored card slid under Curtis’s hotel door: Come see what you left behind. Believing it to be Carol’s dramatic gesture, he followed the invitation. But the sight that awaited him was not hers. A sleek jet emblazoned Bennett Private stood ready. Confused, he boarded—and froze when he saw Laura, calm and poised in an ivory suit.
