I nodded even though he couldn’t see me. Wiped my face with the back of my hand. Tried to breathe past the tightness in my chest.
“I need to see Dr. Beaumont,” I said. “I need a blood test to confirm. I need to make sure the levels are?—”
“I’ll pick you up in an hour.”
“Amai, it’s not even six in the morning. The clinic doesn’t open until?—”
“I don’t care what time the clinic opens.” His voice was firm. Final. “I’m calling Dr. Beaumont right now. She’ll meet us there. One hour, Truth. Be ready.”
The line went dead.
I sat on the bathroom floor, phone still pressed to my ear, staring at the three positive tests and trying to process what had just happened.
Mama was watching me with knowing eyes.
“He’s coming to get you,” she said. It wasn’t a question.
“In an hour.”
She nodded slowly. “That man doesn’t do anything halfway, does he?”
I thought about the way his voice had cracked when I told him. The way he’d saidthank you,like I’d given him something precious. The way he promised we’d deal with it together if something went wrong.
“No,” I said quietly. “He doesn’t.”
Mama stood up, her knees popping, and held out her hand to help me up. “Then you better get dressed. And eat something. You’re eating for two now.”
The words hit me all over again.Eating for two.There was a baby inside me. Amai’s baby. A life we’d created through needles, hormones, hope, and sheer stubborn determination.
I looked down at my still-flat stomach and felt something shift inside my chest. Something that felt like the beginning of love. Or maybe just the beginning of understanding what love could become.
“Mama,” I said as she headed toward the door. She turned back. “Thank you. For being here. For-for everything.”
She smiled, and for the first time in weeks, it reached her eyes. “That’s what mamas do, baby. We show up. Even when it’s hard. Especially when it’s hard.”
She left the bathroom, and I heard her moving around in the kitchen, probably starting coffee, probably already planning what she’d make me for breakfast.
I picked up the three tests and lined them up on the counter. Three sets of two pink lines. Three confirmations. Three pieces of evidence that my life had just changed forever.
In an hour, Amai would be here. In an hour, we’d go to the clinic and get the blood test and make this official. In an hour, everything would be real in a way it hadn’t been before.
But right now, in this moment, it was just me and these three tests and the knowledge that I’d done it. My body had done what it was supposed to do. The transfer had worked.
I was pregnant.
And for the first time in two weeks—maybe for the first time since I’d signed that contract—I let myself believe that maybe, just maybe, everything was going to be okay.
Amai arrived exactly one hour later, just like he’d promised.
I heard his car pull up before I saw it—the low purr of an expensive engine that didn’t belong on our street. I was sitting on the porch steps with Mama, both of us nursing coffee in the early morning quiet, when the black Mercedes turned onto our block.
Mama raised an eyebrow. “That man don’t waste no time, do he?”
“No,” I said quietly. “He doesn’t.”
I stood as Amai parked in front of the house. My legs felt shaky, like they weren’t quite sure they wanted to hold me up. The pregnancy tests were in my purse, wrapped in tissue paper like something precious. Evidence. Proof. Three pink lines that had changed everything.
Amai got out of the car and walked toward us. He was wearing dark jeans and a black button-down, sleeves rolled to his elbows, looking like a man who’d gotten dressed in a hurry but still managed to look put together. His eyes found mine immediately, and something in my chest tightened at the intensity in his gaze.
