"Three weeks," I say. "Maybe four."
Matilda's hand finds mine across the table. Her eyes are enormous.
"There's a pharmacy two doors down," she says.
I take the test in the cafe bathroom because I can't wait to know now I know it’s a possibility.
Two minutes. That's what the box says. Two minutes to change the shape of everything.
I lean against the edge of the hand basin and stare at the little plastic window and think about all the versions of this moment that could have existed. The version where I'm sitting in my father's house, terrified, performing someone else's expectation. The version where the test is the final checkbox on a contract, a confirmation of function, a proof of worth delivered to a council that measures women in output.
That's not this version.
This version has Matilda's voice through the door and a husband at home who pulls out my chair and a family that calls me by name and a house where every door opens from the inside.
The second line appears.
I stare at it. Watch it darken from faint to definitive, a slow materialization that feels less like a result and more like an arrival.
I open the bathroom door.
Matilda takes one look at my face and bursts into tears.
"Hormones," she says, pulling me into her arms. "Shut up. I'm blaming hormones."
I laugh against her shoulder. Then I cry. Then I laugh again, because I'm standing in a cafe holding a positive pregnancy test and I'm happy. Purely, simply, devastatingly happy, and the version of me who arrived at the Orlov estate three months agoin a white dress and an empty smile wouldn't recognize this feeling if it hit her in the face.
Which it has. Repeatedly. For weeks, apparently, and I was too busy being alive to notice.
The drive home takes forty minutes.
Forty minutes of my hand on my stomach and the road blurring past and the test in my purse and my heart beating so hard I can feel it in my throat.
I'm pregnant.
I'm carrying Killian Orlov's child because I chose to. Because I walked down a hallway and knocked on a door and saidI'm readyand meant it. Because he waited until I wanted him and then gave me everything and the everything took root and is now the size of, according to Matilda's gleeful googling, a blueberry.
A blueberry. Our blueberry.
The estate gates open as I approach. The house rises ahead of me, stone and iron and the kind of permanence that used to feel like confinement and now feels like the opposite. Home. It feels like home. It has felt like home since the morning he unbuttoned my dress and let me breathe.
I park and sit in the car for a moment, both hands on my stomach, and I think about how to tell him.
I could be strategic about it. Build the reveal. Set the scene. Killian would appreciate the precision.
Or I could just tell him. Walk through the door and find him and say the words and watch his face.
I choose the second option. Because I spent twenty years being strategic and careful and choreographed, and one of the things this man has taught me is that sometimes the most powerful thing you can do is say what you mean without dressing it up.
I find him in the study.
He's at his desk, sleeves rolled, reading something on his laptop, and he looks up when I appear in the doorway and his expression does the thing it always does. The shift, the warming, the private recalibration from public to personal that I will never tire of seeing.
"How was Matilda?" he asks.
"Enormous. Happy. Obsessed with chocolate cake." I cross the room. I'm vibrating. I can feel it. A low-frequency hum running through my body that I'm almost certain he can see, because he can always see, because he never misses a thing.
His eyes narrow slightly. Reading me. Noting the flush on my cheeks, the brightness in my eyes, the way I'm holding my handbag too tightly.
