Page 2 of Pregnant By A Rich Demon 4

That thought should have comforted me. For one dizzying second, it almost did. Then it morphed into something else.

If he wasn’t gone—not really, not completely—then what exactly had happened to him? What did reabsorbed actually mean mechanically, and who had confirmed it beyond a doctor reading a screen and offering me a word I’d never heard before that hour? I wasn’t accusing anyone. I didn’t have proof of a single thing. I had grief, and grief was doing what grief does when a man refuses to let it simply be sad—looking for a door left slightly open, some detail that meant this could still, somehow, not be final.

I told myself I just needed to think. Away from the fluorescent lights, away from Truth’s crying, away from Amai’s face doing that thing it had done in the exam room. Stillness. Not a smirk. Not anything I could point to and call relief. Just stillness so complete it read like nothing at all, and I hated that I couldn’t tell what was underneath it. I filed it away without deciding what it meant because, knowing him, watching me suffer was always a highlight in his world.

I needed somewhere quiet. Somewhere that was mine.

I took the exit toward the river.

The dock access road was gated, unmarked, the kind of turnoff you’d drive past a hundred times without registering it as leading anywhere. I’d bought the easement two years ago through three shell entities, none of which had my name attached to anything a records search would find in under a week.

The boat sat low and dark against the gray water, a hundred and eighty feet of decommissioned riverboat casino I’d bought for pennies against what it would eventually cost me to make it whole. From the outside, it still looked like what it used to be—peeling gilt lettering, ghost letters that used to spell something with Freedom in it, round windows like portholes on a cruise liner. Marcus’s crew had left the exterior deliberately untouched. Nobody looking at this boat from the water was supposed to think there was anything inside it worth a second look.

I walked up the gangway, the cane doing its job against the metal grating, and let myself in through the crew door on the lower deck.

Inside was a different world.

The old casino floor greeted me first—open, cavernous, the ceiling still hung with the original crystal light fixtures because I’d told Marcus to keep them, to keep something of what this place used to be, even as we built a new life inside its bones. Half the floor was still bare boards where the gaming tables used to sit, roped off. The other half had been framed into rooms, walls rising where rows of slot machines used to stand.

I walked through it slowly. The security command center sat where the high-stakes room used to be, banks of monitors dark and waiting, cycling through feeds of every deck, every stairwell, every approach by water. The commercial kitchen gleamed steel and quiet behind double doors, already stocked. Down a short corridor, the medical room sat sealed behind reinforced glass—exam table, crash cart, enough supplies to handle most emergencies a hundred miles from the nearest hospital, because that was the whole point of a place like this. Self-sufficient. Nothing you needed had to come from outside if you didn’t want it to.

I passed the water filtration system humming in its own room, the backup generators housed two decks down, tested and ready, according to the binder the contractor had left on the kitchen counter. I’d designed all of it, across eighteen months of phone calls and blueprint revisions, back when this project had been about something almost embarrassingly simple: a place nobody could reach me. Not Winston. Not Rahsaan. Not the war that kept finding its way onto the Landry doorstep.

I hadn’t built it as a prison. I’d built it as a sanctuary, back before the world had changed into something so complex.

The master suite took up most of the upper deck—floor-to-ceiling reinforced glass looking out over black water, one-way from the inside. The tender was the only practical transport route, and I controlled it. If you wanted on this boat, I had to be the one who brought you.

I found myself in the nursery before I’d consciously decided to go there.

Two cribs. I’d ordered them matching—white spindled wood, organic cotton mattresses positioned mirror-image on either side of the room. I stood in the doorway and looked at them, fighting the urge my knees had to buckle. The pain cut deep.

Why my son? I always got the short end of the stick. Kaisen the fuck up.

I crossed the room and took hold of the crib on the left—the one I’d started thinking of somewhere in the last two months without ever saying it out loud, as his—and I dismantled it piece by piece. The side rail came off with four screws. The mattress board lifted free. I stacked the pieces against the wall, careful, methodical, and by the time I was done, there was one crib left standing in the center of a room built for two.

I couldn’t touch the rest of it.

The dresser drawers were already full—onesies with embroidered clouds, a set of tiny socks that had made me laugh out loud in the store because I couldn’t believe feet came that small. A stuffed elephant sat propped against the pillow of the remaining crib, the one I’d bought on impulse because the fabric had felt impossibly soft under my thumb, and I’d thought, stupidly, he’ll like this. A mobile hung motionless overhead in the still, sealed air.

I stood there a long time.

I told myself I’d deal with it later—donate it. A clean, reasonable decision a grieving father was supposed to make eventually. But standing there with my hand on the crib rail that remained, I knew I wasn’t going to do that. Not yet. Those objects were the only proof I had that he’d been real at all—that for a brief moment I’d had a son instead of a hypothesis—and I wasn’t ready to erase the last physical evidence of him just because a doctor had used a word that made his disappearance sound like biology instead of something worse.

I took my phone out and called the contractor.

He answered on the second ring, background noise cutting off abruptly like he’d stepped outside. “Kaisen. Everything alright?”

“I need the boat operational,” I said. “Fully. Not the walkthrough in three weeks. Not the punch list next month. Now.”

There was a pause, the kind a man takes when he’s doing math on what now actually costs. “Now’s a big ask. We got the water filtration certified, generators tested, but the security suite still needs⁠—”

“I don’t care what it needs. Pull crews from whatever else you’re running. Double the pay again if that’s what it takes. I want this boat livable, secure, and stocked ASAP.” I looked at the crib still standing, at the elephant leaning against the pillow like it was waiting for someone. “I want it ready to bring my family here.”

“Your family,” he repeated, carefully, the way a man repeats a phrase back to you when he’s trying to figure out how much of it he’s supposed to question.

“That’s what I said.”

A shorter pause. He’d worked for me long enough to know which questions were worth asking. “One week,” he said. “I’ll need the generator team through the weekend, but I can have it done.”