We both go still. Of course it does. The world knocks, patient as mold.
“Don’t,” Jason says, gentle, warning himself more than me. “We picked us.”
“I know.” I do. I want to keep knowing. But our plans live in those pixels too—counsel, Julia, doctors, my own mother’s number I haven’t dared touch. I turn my face into his chest and try to let it pass like a train you didn’t mean to watch.
The hum comes again. Longer this time. Insistent. The sound buzzes along my nerves like a persistent fly that knows it’s not welcome and also knows we’re too polite to swat it in bed.
“Riley,” he says into my hair, a question wrapped around my name.
I sigh, already mourning the quiet even as I reach for the bedside lamp. “Two seconds,” I promise, a treaty I mean to honor. “If it’s nothing, it goes facedown.”
The lamp clicks. The room tilts into amber. I swing my legs out from under the duvet and the night cool kisses my skin. The phone hums again from the kitchen, distant and steady, like a heartbeat we don’t want to claim.
“I’ll grab it,” Jason offers, already half-sitting.
“I’ve got it,” I say, and hear the steel in my own voice. I don’t want this moment to end, but I’m done being chased down hallways by things I’m strong enough to face.
I pad toward the door, the floor cool under my feet, the apartment smelling like rain and us and the lemon dish soap we never rinse enough. The hum doesn’t stop.
It’s waiting on the counter, screen facedown, vibrating in place like a trapped bee.
I put a hand on it to still the sound.
And I turn it over.
The screen comes alive so bright it bites. For a half second I’m looking at our reflections—me in Jason’s T-shirt, hair a mess, eyes wider than I mean them to be—and then the notification stack blooms over my face like a rash.
BREAKING: ULTRASOUND IMAGE LEAKED
The banner sits there, smug and blue, daring me to tap. A thumbnail pulses beneath it: black-and-white static, familiar grain, the ghosty comma of a sac like a smudge of breath on glass. In the bottom right corner, half clipped by the crop, is a watermark I know because I signed the HIPAA form myself. My clinic’s logo. It feels like a finger on the inside of my throat.
Behind me, the mattress creaks. “Riley?” Jason’s voice is careful the way you talk to someone balancing a tray full of glass.
I don’t answer yet. My thumb hovers. I hit the banner.
The app blooms into a tabloid splash: a washed-out ultrasound photo, contrast cranked to conspiracy levels, arrows and circles pointing like accusations. The headline screams in a font last used for meteors and scandal:IS THIS JASON MADDOX’S BABY?Subhead:Exclusive Clinic Source Confirms. My stomach flips hard enough to make the room tilt.
Exclusive clinic source. My clinic. My air thins. Images swipe across the screen: the same photo, cropped tighter; a version with their watermark splashed over the clinic’s, like theft can be branded into legitimacy; a side-by-side of me and Jason leaving the league building earlier today, my hand near my middlepurely because I was nauseous and the elevator was slow. The caption invents a world to fit the frame.
“Riley.” Closer now. Floorboards. His palm lands between my shoulder blades, warm, present. It almost helps. It also makes me feel the shake I’ve been outrunning since the door shut.
“It’s the clinic,” I manage. The words are splinters. “They had to have…someone had to—” I can’t finish the sentence without tasting bile.
Jason goes very still, the way he does when the play is about to break open. “Don’t click anything else,” he says. “Screenshots only.” He reaches around me, not touching the phone, just hovering like a brace for my wrists. “We send it straight to counsel. Chain of custody. We do this right.”
I nod, jerky, because process is the only thing keeping the floor from vanishing. My thumb fumbles to the screenshot buttons. The fake shutter sound is obscene in the quiet. Another alert stacks on top of the first—different outlet, same image, a crop that catches more of the watermark and less of the context. A third piles on with a poll:Should the team suspend her?
Heat rushes up my neck. Not anger. Not yet. Something colder. “They can’t do this,” I say, which is childish and true and useless.
“They did,” Jason says, voice a low edge. “So now we make them wish they hadn’t.” He squeezes the back of my neck once—steady, grounding. “Breathe with me.”
I try. In for four, hold two—my breath trips on the hold because another vibration crawls through my palm. The banner stretches wider, the app eager to show me more.
A new push alert muscles to the top, capital letters like a siren:ULTRASOUND IMAGE LEAKED—DEVELOPING LIVE AT 11.Under it, the blurred thumbnail refreshes to a cleaner version, the watermark heartbreakingly crisp.
The room narrows to the size of my screen.
Somewhere far away, rain starts up again.
