When the baby appeared on the screen, we all leaned forward instinctively.
Alec’s smile curved into something unmistakably self-satisfied. Nick’s jaw dropped, unguarded for once. Ella gasped.
“Oh,” she breathed, her voice catching.“That’s my baby.”
“Our baby,” I corrected quietly, swallowing against the sudden tightness in my throat.
This hit harder than I’d expected.
A new life.
A life we had created with Ella.
There it was—flickering and undeniable.
Proof on the screen.
???
Ella grew quiet in the days that followed. Not empty—just contained. I knew there was plenty she wanted to say, but her throat was red and swollen, her voice reduced to something low and rough that scraped when she tried to use it. When she did speak, it was usually frustration breaking through—aimed at the three of us hovering, correcting, offering, adjusting.
I wouldn’t deny it: that husky edge to her voice did things to me. Still did. But it wasn’t the time.
It never developed into a full-blown flu, not quite, but she was tired and miserable enough that we kept our hands—and our dicks—to ourselves. That restraint mattered. It wasn’t performative. It was instinctive. Care before appetite. Protection before want.
A part of me wanted to prove the nurse wrong.
We could get her pregnant.
And we could look after her.
Fuck her thinly veiled judgement. Fuck the way she’d looked at us like we were a complication instead of a unit.
Nick and Alec both had their own ways of needling Ella—pressing buttons, teasing reactions—but we weren’t animals. Not where it counted. Not when she was like this. There was a line, and none of us crossed it.
The days slipped by quietly. The accusatory looks she’d thrown at us at first—measuring, suspicious—softened into something else. Appraisal, maybe. Recognition. She was watching us the way people do when they’re trying to decide if something is real.
This wasn’t manipulation. And she was beginning to understand that.
We didn’t flinch at the used tissues piling up on the bedside table. We took turns through feverish nights, passing water, checking her temperature, changing the sheets when she sweated through them. Sometimes we failed to dodge a sneeze, caught it full in the chest or the side of the face, and just wiped it off without comment.
No theatrics. No martyrdom.
Just presence.
And slowly—so slowly—it stopped feeling like we were proving something. It just became what we did.
Chapter 57
Nick
The room reeked of sweat, stale alcohol and something sour that clung to the back of my throat the longer I stood there. The curtains were half-drawn, trapping the humidity inside the narrow space, and the single bedside lamp cast a jaundiced glow over peeling paint and water-stained carpet. Nothing had changed for James. Not the decay. Not the self-pity. Not the quiet spiral of a man who had spent his life choosing the easiest poison in the room.
He would continue to be a burden on Ella until we stopped him.
I had left him with options. A case of bottles on the table. A small packet within reach. Alcohol or drugs. Slow failure or sudden collapse. The illusion of choice for a man who had never taken responsibility for any of them.
An image of my father rose uninvited in the dark corners of my mind. His temper had always arrived before his fists, filling a room with dread long before the pain began. He liked the anticipation, liked watching us shrink before he even lifted a hand. Ella’s father was cut from a similar cloth, but instead of brute force, he wielded erosion. He didn’t bruise you in one blow. He wore you down. Borrowed from you. Drained you. Returned again and again until there was nothing left but obligation and shame.
