Then, Jessica casually glanced over her shoulder. Her eyes landed on me. She didn’t smile. She didn’t gasp. She looked at me the way one looks at mud tracked onto a clean white rug.
“Oh. You’re here,” she said flatly.
I set my bag down against the wall. “Yeah. I got leave.”
She frowned, her manicured fingers adjusting the lapel of her robe. “Didn’t realize I needed to schedule my bridal fittings around your mysterious work trips.”
She didn’t take the joke. She never did. “Can you not do this today, Morgan?” she sighed, turning back to the full-length mirror. “Everything is already absolute chaos.”
My mother finally turned from the caterers. There was no motherly warmth in her eyes, no relief at seeing her daughter alive. Just sheer irritation. “Morgan, really. You could have at least called. We have a full house and zero spare rooms.”
I nodded slowly, swallowing the metallic taste of exhaustion in my mouth. “Yeah. I can see that.”
No one asked why I was deathly pale. No one asked why I was standing stiffly, as if my muscles were locked in a desperate attempt to keep my insides together. No one cared. Jessica mattered. The dress mattered. The aesthetic mattered.
“Actually,” Jessica snapped her fingers, suddenly remembering I had hands. “Since you’re just standing there, you can help. Those boxes by the stairs need to go up to the guest room. Shoes, accessories, some of the early crystal gifts. Don’t drop them.”
I looked at the heavy stack of cardboard boxes, then back to my sister. Saying no would have sparked a screaming match, and I didn’t have the physical or mental bandwidth for a suburban war. Not today.
“Sure,” I muttered.
I grabbed the first box. It wasn’t incredibly heavy, but the moment I lifted it, something deep inside my abdomen shifted. A sharp, burning tear. I gritted my teeth, ignoring the wet warmth blossoming under my bandages. I carried it up, set it down, and came back for the second.
By the third trip, the pain wasn’t subtle anymore. It was a vicious, blinding agony, radiating outward like shattered glass. I paused at the bottom of the stairs, my hand pressing hard against my side, trying to regulate my breathing.
“Are you seriously taking breaks already?” Jessica’s voice cut through the room like a scalpel. She was staring at me with pure disgust.
“I just got here,” I managed to whisper.
“And you’re already acting like you’re dying,” she shot back. “Can you not be dramatic for five minutes?”
I picked up the final box. Halfway up the staircase, my vision blurred. The edges of the world went dark. I blinked hard, set the box on the landing, and turned to go back down.
That’s when the internal dam broke.
It wasn’t a sharp stab this time. It was a slow, heavy drop inside my body. A catastrophic release of pressure. My grip on the oak railing failed. My legs turned to lead. The world violently tilted, and I collapsed onto the hardwood floor, cold sweat instantly soaking through my shirt.
“Jessica,” I gasped, my voice barely a rattle. “I think… something’s wrong.”
She didn’t rush over. She just stared up at me from the living room, annoyed. “What now, Morgan?”
“I need… a hospital.”
