Page 187 of Pregnant By A Rich Demon 3

Dr. Broussard shifted the wand to Truth’s other side. Pressed deeper. Angled it up, then down, methodical, searching, the kind of searching that had a specific shape to it once you recognized what it looked like—the shape of somebody looking for something that should be there and isn’t turning up where it’s supposed to be.

“Dr. Broussard.” Truth’s voice cracked slightly on the name.

“I need a minute, Truth.” Not unkind. Just quiet. Focused in a way that had stopped sounding routine.

I felt my pulse climbing, my palms damp against my knees. I glanced across the room, and, for the first time since I’d walked in, I looked directly at Amai.

He was already leaning forward, his whole body rigid, his eyes fixed on the screen with an intensity that mirrored whatever was happening in my own chest. Whatever he felt about me, about all of this, about the war we were still circling each other inside of—none of it was on his face right now. There was only the same thing I felt, the thing neither of us wanted to be the one to say out loud.

Dr. Broussard set the wand down for just a second, adjusted a setting on the machine, and picked it back up. Pressed again. Searched again. The room had gone so quiet I could hear the machine humming, could hear Truth’s breath coming faster and shallower on the table, could hear my own heartbeat behind my ears like something trying to get out.

“There’s only one heartbeat,” Dr. Broussard finally said.

The words didn’t land right away. I heard them the way you hear something in a language you’re only half fluent in—recognizable, but not yet real.

“What do you mean one,” I said, my voice coming out rougher than I intended, my hands gripping the arms of the chair. “There’s two. She’s carrying twins. Check again.”

“Kaisen.” Truth’s voice barely a whisper, her eyes still locked on the ceiling like she couldn’t make herself look at the screen or at either of us.

“Check again,” I said, and I was already pushing myself up out of the chair despite my side screaming at me, despite the cane clattering against the floor, because this wasn’t right, this couldn’t be right. I had come here for my son, and I was not leaving this room until somebody told me he was still here.

Dr. Broussard’s eyes lifted from the monitor to Truth’s face, and whatever she was about to say, I could already feel the shape of it filling up the silence before she said a single word.

Dr. Broussard set the wand on the tray and pulled off her gloves, one finger at a time, like she needed the motion to organize what she had to say next.

“I want to explain this carefully,” she said, “because I know how it sounds, and I don’t want either of you walking out of here with more fear than you need to carry.” She looked at Truth first. “The girl is strong. Her heartbeat is exactly where it should be for this gestational age. She’s measuring well, moving well. There’s nothing wrong with her.”

“And the boy,” I said. It wasn’t a question. I already knew what came next, I just needed her to say it so I could hate the words instead of the silence.

“There’s no heartbeat,” Dr. Broussard said. “In twin pregnancies, sometimes one twin’s development stops, and the tissue is reabsorbed by the body over time. It’s called vanishing twin syndrome. It isn’t caused by anything either parent did. It isn’t caused by anything the surviving twin did. It’s a complication of the pregnancy itself, and it happens more often than people realize, especially early on.”

Reabsorbed.

Like he was never anything but material. Like my son had been raw stock and gotten filed away into inventory nobody asked for.

I looked at Amai.

I don’t know what I expected. Grief, maybe, some baseline human recognition that a child had disappeared out of the world before he ever got the chance to be in it. What I got instead was almost nothing—which was worse. His jaw didn’t move. His hands stayed loose in his lap. But his mouth did something, just barely, at one corner, and he let a breath out slow through his nose like a man setting down a weight he’d been carrying too long.

Relief. That’s what it was. He was relieved.

Truth broke before I could open my mouth about it. A sound came out of her that didn’t sound like crying at first, more like something tearing, and then she had both hands over her face, and her shoulders were shaking. Dr. Broussard was already moving toward her, murmuring something about it being okay to grieve even a pregnancy this complicated, that loss is loss no matter the circumstances.

That’s what did it. Not the doctor’s words. Truth’s sound. It cracked something open in me that had been holding since I read her text that morning, since I decided he had my mother’s eyes, since I built him a whole room with elephants on the wallpaper.

“Of course,” I said. I heard my own voice rising and didn’t try to stop it. “Of course, it’s her. Of course, your daughter took him. She’s not even here yet, and she’s already just like you—taking what she wants, taking what isn’t hers.”

“Kaisen.” Truth reached for me, her hand landing on my arm, wet-faced, trying to pull me back into the room instead of wherever I was going. “That’s not—it doesn’t work that way. It’s not anybody’s fault⁠—”

“Everything works that way with him. Everything he touches, he takes. He took my pride, he took the streets, he took you, and now he’s taken my son too, and he’s sitting there looking relieved about it.”

“That’s enough.” Dr. Broussard’s voice cut clean through the room, calm but with an edge under it that said she’d had to say versions of that sentence before, in rooms exactly like this one. “This is a medical space. I understand this is devastating. But I need everyone to breathe.”

I didn’t breathe. I turned and left, because staying meant looking at Amai’s face for one more second, and I already knew if I did that, I was going to do something in that office I couldn’t undo.

The parking lot air hit me like something with weight to it. I got in my car and sat there with the engine off, hands on the wheel, staring at the beige stucco of the building like it might rearrange itself—like if I looked away and looked back hard enough, this would turn out to be a different day.

It didn’t rearrange. It just sat there being exactly what it was.