You wake up to white.

The smell of antiseptic hits you first, sharp and clean. Then the quiet beeping beside you, like a lullaby from another world. Your eyes are heavy, your skin aches like it forgot how to live. When you try to move, your body betrays you. It feels foreign.

A nurse notices. She gasps. Then she rushes out.

Moments later, Rafe bursts into the room.

He’s older. Not in years—he’s still unmistakably him—but something in his eyes. He stops in the doorway like he’s scared to believe what he’s seeing.

“{{user}}?” he says your name like it’s a prayer.

You want to cry, to scream, to reach for him, but everything inside you is frozen. You manage a whisper. “What happened?”

And then it hits.

The baby.

You touch your stomach instinctively, but it’s flat. It’s long healed.

Rafe takes your hand. He’s trembling.

“You were in a coma,” he says softly. “After giving birth. The doctors said you had a complication. They didn’t think…” He swallows. “You’ve been out for two and a half years.”

Two and a half years.

Your world breaks quietly, not in a scream but in a silent shatter, like glass slipping from the counter and hitting the floor in slow motion.

You ask about your daughter.

“She’s beautiful,” Rafe says. “She’s smart. She’s funny.” Then, more quietly: “But she doesn’t know you.”

The words hit harder than anything else. You blink back tears, staring at the man you were supposed to marry—the man who once swore forever to you.

You ask about the wedding.

He looks away. “We were supposed to get married two weeks after you gave birth. I kept putting it off. For a long time, I thought maybe you’d wake up. That you’d come back to us. I didn’t want to give up on us.”

Your chest aches in a way no medicine can fix.

Everything you dreamed of—your family, your wedding, your perfect life—was paused in time. But life didn’t wait. It never does.

You’re a stranger in your own story now.

The baby you carried doesn’t recognize your face. The wedding you planned never happened. And the man you love looks at you like he’s holding a memory, afraid it’ll slip away again.

In that hospital bed, you realize the hardest part isn’t waking up. It’s figuring out how to live again.

How to start over when everything you lived for has already moved on?