The Truth Behind His Silence

Chloe Blair goes into labor and suffers an amniotic fluid embolism. It is the kind of emergency that can kill in minutes, and in the entire city there is exactly one doctor with the skill to bring her through it. That doctor is Ethan Hayes, her husband, and he is sitting on a bench outside the delivery room playing a game on his phone. When they ask him to go in, he says the hospital has a rule against doctors operating on their own family, and that breaking it would cost him his job. He gives that answer to her relatives, to the staff, to everyone who comes at him in the corridor, and he keeps his composure while they call him selfish and heartless. He does not correct any of them. Word spreads through the hospital and past it. Behind the calm and behind the rule he keeps citing there is another reason he is staying in that chair, one he will not say aloud to any of the people currently hating him for it.