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THE MOMENT WE LANDED in Singapore, Cutter and I were rushed by ambulance to Gleneagles Hospital, which was considered to be among the world’s finest.
I was still hazy from the drugs I’d been given, but not hazy enough to be unaware of the conversations taking place around me. From those alone, I knew that we were about to arrive at the hospital’s emergency entrance, and that doctors and nurses were waiting outside for us—as were the press.
“Get rid of them,” Alex said to somebody, likely to Tank.
“No,” I heard Barbara say. “The world has only heard that you’re alive. Now, they need to see it for themselves. Let the press take your photographs and run those photos wherever they can. Right now, it’s critical that you prove to anyone who doubts that you’re alive that you are indeed alive—and not at the bottom of the ocean that claimed the lives of our friends.”
“We need to move,” I heard the doctor say. “Now.”
With that, I heard the ambulance doors swing open with a clatter of metal. I felt a breath of warm air waft across my face, and I heard a cacophony of voices rise up just outside the ambulance in anticipation of our exit. Alex leaned in next to me, kissed me on the lips, and said, “Hang in there for me?”
I nodded at him. “Let’s do this.”
While there was a part of me that wanted to hide from the media as I was rolled out of the ambulance, I chose not to because, after listening to Blackwell, I knew that I also had a part to play in this. So I fought for clarity and took the opportunity that was being presented to me.
When they rolled me outside, I heard and felt the excitement thrumming in the air. I glanced around me and saw a surprising number of reporters being held at bay by police as we started to move toward the emergency entrance.
Cameras flashed.
People called out our names.
Questions were hurled our way.
"How did you survive on that island, Mr. Wenn?”
“Why did your plane go down?
“How many people are dead?”
“Who were those people on the island with you?”
“Is that Mrs. Wenn in the gurney?”
Nobody answered. Nobody said a thing. We just kept moving forward. For all the press knew, I could very well be dead.
I need to do something.
With an effort, I turned my face to the reporters and lifted my hand so they could see that I was alive, which would crush any tabloid fodder that I was dead—and that Alexander Wenn had lost a second wife.
The hand I raised was the one with the intravenous drip attached to it, which I showed them on purpose because I knew it was too dramatic a shot for any media outlet to overlook. The press had manipulated Alex and me since we’d begun dating a year ago, but they had been especially brutal since Wenn’s earnings fell short of Wall Street’s expectations due to the research and development that went into the development of the SlimPhone. That, coupled with the media’s unrelenting questioning of whether Wenn could survive such a financial blow, had caused our stock to plummet.
And right now, I wasn’t above manipulating them because of it.
The moment I raised my hand, I heard the uptick in the rapid clicking of cameras. People called out my name. I waved to them and gave them a thumbs up, lowering my hand only once I was wheeled out of sight and through the hospital’s emergency entrance.
Doctors and nurses were on either side of me, but so was Alex, who held my arm as we hurried down a hallway.
“Where is Cutter?” I asked.
“Just behind us.”
“What’s going to happen to him?”
“He’ll be treated immediately.”
“And me?”
“They need to assess your wound, and then we’ll take it from there.”
“Somebody must know if I’m going to have surgery.”
“No doctor with proper equipment has looked at you, so we don’t know if you need surgery yet. But it’s possible that you do.”
“Alex, if our child is still alive, it can’t sustain a surgery. You know that. If they put me under, it’ll be too much for the baby to bear.”
“We’re in one of the world’s best hospitals, Jennifer. They'll only do what’s right.”
“For whom? For me? Or for me and our child?”
Before he could answer, I saw a hand descend upon his shoulder—it was one of the nurses, quietly telling him that he could go no farther. Quickly, he kissed me again on the lips, and told me that he loved me and that he would be waiting just outside for the doctor when they were finished examining me.
When I was examined, it turned out that I wasn’t going to get out of this so easily. After undergoing an MRI, it was clear that, while the bullet may have broken no bones, it nevertheless had caused muscle damage severe enough to warrant an operation.
“We need to operate now,” the surgeon said to Alex and me when Alex was brought into the room. “The wound we’re dealing with is tricky—the muscle is still actively tearing each time she moves and breathes.” He looked down at me. “Because of that, the sooner we operate, the better chance you'll have for a full recovery. The longer we wait, the more I fear that you’ll go through life with only limited use of your arm and shoulder. Do I have your permission to operate now?”
“I’m pregnant,” I said to the man with tears in my eyes. “Or I might be. Before I commit to any of this, I need to know whether I am or not. So, tell me. If you put me under and I am pregnant, could that harm my child?”
“There’s a possibility of that, yes.”
“Then do a pregnancy test.”
“There’s no time for a pregnancy test,” the man said.
“I’m sorry, but there is time, so make it. Give me the test. Do it now, or I'll take my chances otherwise.”
“Jennifer,” Alex said.
I looked up at him as the doctor moved swiftly out of the room. “Don’t you see?” I said as I started to cry. “I have to know. So do you. We need to know that fixing my shoulder doesn’t turn out to be the reason we lost our child. If it’s still alive, then to hell with the surgery. I won’t have it. I won’t risk our child for the sake of my shoulder and my arm.”
“Think about what you’re saying. Listen to yourself. Your life also matters. It matters to me. We can try again, Jennifer. You know that. And we’ll be successful.”
“Neither of us knows that. If this child is still alive, I will do anything to protect it just as I would do anything to protect you. Do you have any idea how far I would go to help you, Alex? That’s the same length I’m willing to go to save our child. Unless I have no choice, I’m not giving up on it. I’m not.”
But thirty minutes later, after a urine and blood sample had been taken from me, the worst proved true. I could see it on the doctor's grim face when he returned to the room, and the pain I felt was unlike any other pain I’d experienced. It was greater even than any pain I’d felt at the hands of my alcoholic parents, who had abused me my whole life.
“I’m so sorry,” the doctor said to us.
I shook my head at him. “No,” I said. “It’s wrong. This can’t be.”
“We've done the tests. We ran them twice.”
Alex took my hand and when he squeezed it, I could feel him trembling.
“Please,” I said.
“I’m afraid that you’ve miscarried, Mrs. Wenn—but not recently. There are no signs of HCG in your system, which indicates that you likely lost the child when your plane crashed. If you’d lost it in the shooting, there would still be solid signs of the hormone in your system. But there is barely a trace of it. This isn’t your fault. You’ve done nothing to harm your child. You need to know that it would be nearly impossible for a fetus so early in its development to sustain such a blow.”
Before he could say anything more, I became so overwhelmed with despair and grief that I started to cry in outrage and loss. I heard Blackwell call out my name from beyond the closed door to the examination room. I felt Alex nuzzle his face close to my neck, and then place the palm of his hand against my cheek. I felt him shudder against me as he told me again and again that he loved me. I heard the doctor say how sorry he was. And even though on some subconscious level I had tried to prepare myself for this moment, it now became clear to me that there was no preparing for such a moment. There was nothing that could steal away the pain of losing my first child. And so I howled even louder in grief. I started to heave and cry in the face of our loss. I looked at Alex, and saw my own pain reflected in his eyes.
And it was at that moment that the world started to dim.
“Jennifer,” Alex said. “This won’t be it for us. We will get pregnant again. We’ll have a child.”
“How do you know that?” I asked. “How do either of us know that?”
“Because it’s true.”
But I wasn’t so sure. The plane crash could have damaged my body in ways that might prove impossible for us to conceive again, and the very idea of what that might do to my marriage made me start to shake at the very thought of it.
My heart began to race.
My body was suddenly sheathed in sweat.
And then everything I saw around me started to whirl and blur in ways that were at once familiar and frightening.
“Look at me,” Alex said. “Stay with me,” he said.
But the moment he spoke, I heard the emotion in his voice, I felt the tension behind his embrace—and that was all it took. A crushing sense of loss overcame me, followed by a feeling of faintness—and then a world I never wanted to face again quietly went dark.
