Chapter 2The Surgeon and My Secret Baby

The only reason I had fought the admission was that I had no one to watch the baby.

Once the paperwork was processed, I took a frantic cab home, packed a weekend bag, buckled Toby into his infant car seat, and brought him right back into the pediatric-friendly wing of the hospital.

By two in the morning, Toby was screaming for a bottle.

The nursery-grade sterile water in my room had run out, and the call button yielded a recording that the floor nurse was attending an emergency code down the hall. In sheer desperation, I gathered my shrieking, red-faced newborn in one arm, gripped an empty bottle in the other, and shuffled down the hall in my hospital slippers to knock on Dr. Hayes's on-call room.

The heavy door swung open to reveal Logan, dark circles bruised under his bloodshot eyes, radiating pure, exhausted hostility.

"What?" he demanded.

I stood there, swaying on my feet, Toby wailing between us at top volume. "Dr. Hayes... do you have filtered water? I just need to mix two ounces of formula."

Toby’s cries escalated into shrill, breathless hiccups. Logan ran a hand roughly through his sleep-mussed dark hair, exhaling a low, venomous growl.

"Bring your kid inside. Now."

I scurried through the door before he could slam it in our faces.

Inside the small room, he snatched the bottle from my fingers, his jaw ticking tightly. "Cece Mercer, you really haven't lost your knack for torturing me, have you?"

He measured water from a temperature-controlled dispenser, his knuckles white. "Five years, and you haven't grown up a bit. You get admitted to a hospital and you drag an infant with you? Where is his father? Dead?"

I pressed my lips together, stung by his vitriol. "He can't take care of him."

Logan didn't look at me, but his voice went dangerously quiet. "Why?"

"Just like you said," I whispered, looking down at Toby's tiny fist clutching my hospital gown. "He's dead."

Silence dropped like an iron weight.

The next second, the floodgates broke. Tears spilled over my lashes, hot and uncontrollable. It wasn’t grief over a dead phantom; it was the raw, bone-deep exhaustion of a single mother running on forty-five minutes of sleep, drowning in hormones, pain, and isolation. The sheer pressure of the last nine months cracked wide open.

Perhaps because my breakdown was so sudden and unscripted, the perennial ice in his expression fractured.

"Cece... I..." He reached out awkwardly, his hand hovering. "I didn't mean—"

I rubbed my wet sleeves across my cheeks, choking on a sob. "Save it. I know I deserve this. My life went completely to hell after I dumped you. Are you satisfied now?"