I walked toward the study door.
Slower now..
And then I froze.
Because I heard voices.
The door was slightly ajar.
Ramiro.
“...did you notice Loretta is paler now than she used to be?” Ramiro said, his tone lower than usual. “And she’s been sick almost every morning. What if she’s pregnant? Have you even considered that?”
Silence.
Then the rustle of papers.
When Rafael finally spoke, his voice was calm.
“You’re making assumptions.”
Another pause.
“She lost a child before,” he said quietly. “The trauma from that... I don’t think she wants to go through it again. Even if shedecided she did, she would’ve talked to me about it. Besides... do you honestly think I’d ever let Loretta carry my baby?”
The words slammed into me like a physical blow.
For a second, I didn’t even process them as sound.
It was as if my brain refused to translate what I had heard, as if understanding it would make it real in a way I couldn’t survive.
My body reacted first instead—my grip loosening, my fingers going numb one by one.
The envelope slipped free.
It fluttered to the floor in slow motion, like something insignificant.
But it’s significant.
Everything in me shattered in the same instant it touched the marble.
My chest caved inward with a sharp, suffocating pain that stole my breath completely. It wasn’t emotional pain alone—it was physical, as if something inside me had been crushed and couldn’t expand again.
I pressed a trembling hand to my mouth, trying to hold back the sound that rose anyway.
A broken, humiliating breath.
How could he say that?
How could Rafael say something like that so easily?
“Besides... do you honestly think I’d ever let Loretta carry my baby?”
The sentence replayed in my head again, louder this time. Stripped of context. Stripped of everything he had ever been to me.
As if I were nothing.
As if what was growing inside me meant nothing.
