Page 1 of Pregnant By A Rich Demon 4

Chapter 1

KAISEN

Iwas still sitting in my car when a nurse ran after me.

“Mr. Landry! Mr. Landry!”

I lowered my window. “How can I help you?”

“Dr. Broussard wanted me to give you this.”

“Why in the fuck would I want an ultrasound that my baby is not in? Now y’all playing in my damn face!” I snatched it from her and tossed it.

“I’m… I’m… I’m sorry,” she stuttered before turning on her heels and running back inside.

The ultrasound picture was on the passenger seat where it landed, printed on that thin thermal paper that curls automatically. One gray smear of a shape. One flutter of a heartbeat rendered in black and white pixels.

One.

I picked it up and held it closer to my face like proximity might change what I was looking at, like if I got close enough, I’d find a second shape hiding behind the first, folded up small, just waiting for someone to notice it. There wasn’t a second shape. There was the girl, and there was the space around her where a boy used to be, and there was me, sitting in a heated leather seat in a parking garage, trying to remember how lungs were supposed to work because they switched from automatic to manual in an instant.

I came here with a son.

I pressed the start button on the car and let it run, engine silent, because I couldn’t remember what came after that. Foot on the brake. Shift into reverse. Basic mechanics my body suddenly didn’t recognize as belonging to it.

I was leaving without one.

I said it out loud, just to hear if the words sounded as impossible spoken as they did rattling around my brain. They sounded worse. They sounded like a sentence I would have to keep saying for the rest of my life—at Thanksgivings, at random ordinary days, standing in a nursery I’d already half built, saying it to no one because there wasn’t anyone left in the room to hear it.

My chest felt like someone had reached in and scooped something out with their bare hand, leaving a cavity the rest of my organs hadn’t figured out how to fill. I pressed my palm flat against my sternum, like pressure could do anything against a wound with no edges, no blood, nothing a doctor could stitch. I felt something die inside me.

A car alarm went off three rows over. Somebody’s Tahoe chirping twice before falling silent. I flinched like it had physically struck me.

And underneath the grief, quieter, uglier, resentment was moving.

Amai still had his.

The thought arrived against my will, fully formed, and I hated it the second it existed. I hated myself for thinking it in a parking garage mere feet from the room where Truth was still lying on that table, absorbing the same loss I was, because the girl hadn’t done anything. She hadn’t taken anything from anybody. She was just a baby who happened to survive something her brother didn’t, and some sick, small, wounded part of me was already resenting her for it—already doing math on fairness that had no business being done at all.

I pressed the heel of my hand against my eyes until I saw sparks. Not her fault. I made myself think it three times, like a penance, like repetition could bury the uglier thought under the weight of the true one. Amai always wins. He always gets what he wants even though he doesn’t deserve it. His hands were soaked in blood, and to think he got a happily ever after was diabolical.

It didn’t leave. It just went quiet, the way things do when you shove them into the back of your brain instead of dealing with them.

I don’t know how long I sat there before I finally backed up. Long enough that another car pulled out of the row across from me, backed out slowly, and drove off toward the exit ramp. I watched its taillights shrink and thought, absurdly, that whoever was in that car had probably just gotten good news in there. Or no news at all. Just a checkup. Just an ordinary day when nothing came apart. I envied them with a ferocity that scared me a little.

By the time I got onto the interstate, the shock had started to curdle into something with edges.

I kept replaying Dr. Broussard’s voice, the careful, rehearsed calm of a woman who’d clearly had to deliver this news before and built herself a script to survive it. Vanishing twin syndrome. She’d said it like a diagnosis instead of a disappearance, like giving a thing a clinical name made it less like a magic trick performed on my own child’s body.

Reabsorbed.

That word wouldn’t sit still in my head. Reabsorbed. Like tissue. Like fluid. Like something a body simply took back once it decided it didn’t need it anymore.

I merged onto the bridge doing sixty-five in a lane that wanted seventy, and I thought: how much of him is actually gone?

Not scientifically. I wasn’t asking it like a question with a chart behind it. I was asking it the way you ask a question you already know the honest answer to but can’t make yourself accept—the way you keep checking a door you know is locked because some part of your brain refuses to file it under finished.

If tissue got reabsorbed, it went somewhere. Into her. Into the sister. My son hadn’t disappeared into nothing. He’d disappeared into something. Into someone. He was, in some literal, biological sense, still present—diffused into the body of the child who would grow up carrying some infinitesimal trace of him in her cells whether anyone ever told her or not.