The Quiet Between Heartbeats - Doc’s POV

The house was dim and still, except for the soft sound of the baby breathing. The bassinet beside our bed made the smallest creaks when she shifted, and I watched her with a kind of awe I never thought myself capable of. Her tiny fist jerked in sleep, and she made this little sigh—like she'd had a long day at the office.

My chest ached.

Not in a bad way. It was the kind of ache that only comes with overwhelming love. The kind you can’t prepare for, not even if you’ve spent your life fixing broken bodies and reading every medical journal on the planet. Nothing teaches you how to hold your newborn daughter while your heart tries to convince you it might just burst with gratitude.

Andrea stirred beside me, her breath catching for a second before she settled again. Even in sleep, she clung to me like I was home. And maybe—for the first time in my life—I was.

I reached over and brushed a strand of hair from her forehead. She looked soft like this. Peaceful. But I knew the storms she carried. The pain she’d hidden. The courage it had taken for her to come back… to me, to this life, to all of us.

She could have run and stayed gone. And I wouldn’t have blamed her. But she didn’t.

She came back.

I don’t think she’ll ever know what that meant to me.

I’d loved her long before she knew it. Long before she was ready to hear it. I had waited—sometimes patiently, sometimes not—but I never stopped choosing her. Not once. Even when she was tangled in grief, or trauma, or the echoes of someone else’s mistakes, I knew. She was it for me.

And now, we had a child together. Two, really. Anthony had crawled into my heart like he’d always belonged there, and I’d given up trying to guard it against him. He was mine, in every way that mattered.

“Doc…” Andrea’s voice broke through the quiet, barely a whisper.

“I’m here,” I said instantly, brushing my fingers along her arm.

She opened her eyes and blinked at me, sleep still clinging to her expression. “You okay?”

I smiled softly. “Yeah. Just… watching you. Watching her.”

Andrea shifted and turned into my chest, one hand pressed just above my heart. “It’s a lot, isn’t it?”

“It is,” I admitted, pressing a kiss into her hair. “But it’s a good lot.”

There was silence again, but it wasn’t empty. It was full of us—our past, our future, all the messy in-betweens.

“I’m scared sometimes,” she said into the quiet.

I wrapped my arms around her and whispered, “Me too. But I’m not going anywhere.”

She didn’t reply right away. When she finally did, it was soft, but fierce. “Neither am I.”

And in that moment, I knew something with absolute clarity: love wasn’t just about passion or promise. It was this. The quiet between heartbeats. The hands we reached for in the dark. The decision—made again and again—to stay.