Page 3 of Pregnant By A Rich Demon 4

“Do it.”

I hung up and stood in the doorway of a nursery built for two children, one crib dismantled and stacked against the wall, one crib standing untouched in a room that suddenly felt enormous in its emptiness. This wasn’t about taking anything from anyone. This was about making somewhere safe—somewhere Truth could finally breathe once the dust settled and she needed a place that wasn’t tangled up in Amai’s war.

I looked at the elephant one more time before I turned off the light.

I didn’t know yet what I believed happened in that womb. I didn’t have a theory, not really—just a splinter that hadn’t finished working itself in, a refusal to let reabsorbed be the last word on my son. But some part of me, standing in that doorway, had already started building the shape of what came next: a boat that ran on nothing anyone outside could touch, a nursery with one crib and a drawer full of things that had belonged to somebody, a week counted down on a foreman’s calendar.

Grief was still grief. But it had started, without my permission, to look a lot like planning.

I closed the nursery door behind me and went to find out what a week’s worth of urgency actually cost.

Chapter 2

TRUTH

Iwoke up already crying.

Not the slow kind, where you feel it building somewhere behind your eyes and have time to brace. I woke up in the middle of it, like my body had started grieving before my mind caught up and gave it permission. The room was dark except for the thin line of light under the bathroom door, and for a second, I didn’t know why my face was wet. Then, I remembered, and the not-knowing felt almost like mercy, because the knowing came back all at once and sat on my chest like something with weight.

One heartbeat.

Dr. Broussard had said it clinically, the way doctors learn to say the worst things, so the words don’t collapse in their own mouths. There’s only one heartbeat, Truth. And I felt my body go somewhere else for a second, some other room in my head where none of this was happening, where I could still hear her voice narrating two flickering shapes on a screen instead of one.

Amai was already awake beside me. I don’t know how long he’d been watching me sleep, or if he’d slept at all. He didn’t reach for me right away. He just said my name, low, like he was asking permission to exist in the same space as my grief.

“Truth.”

I didn’t answer. I turned into the pillow instead, and it was cold against my cheek. I hated that, too, the stupid coldness of a pillow, like even the fabric didn’t understand what I needed from it.

He didn’t try to pull me toward him. He didn’t say come here. He shifted closer so I could feel the heat of him without the weight of his arms, and he waited. That was new. Two months ago, he would have already had his hands on me, already trying to fix the shape of my sadness into something he could hold and manage. Now he just breathed next to me in the dark and let me fall apart on my own terms.

“She’s fine,” I said finally, my voice wrecked. “The baby. Our daughter. She’s fine, and healthy, and I should be—I should just be grateful for that. That’s what everybody’s gonna say. At least one of them made it.”

“Nobody’s gonna say that to you,” Amai said. “And if they do, I’ll handle it.”

“I’m saying it to myself.”

He was quiet for a moment. I felt him shift, not toward me, just settling deeper into the mattress like he was making himself smaller so I’d have more room.

“You don’t have to be grateful right now,” he said. “You don’t have to be anything right now.”

I turned my head enough to look at him. In the dark, his face was mostly shadow, but I could see the outline of his jaw, tight in a way that told me he was working hard not to fix this, not to reach for some solution, not to do the thing he’d have done a lifetime ago and try to negotiate my grief down to something more manageable.

“I already had names for them,” I said. “I didn’t tell you that.”

“Tell me now.”

“I wasn’t going to use them. I just—I had them. In my head. For when they were born, before I decided for real.” I pressed the heel of my hand against my eye. “I had a whole nursery set up. At first, for one baby, then, when I found out there were two, I added more. Two cribs, and I used to sit in there at night and just—see it. See them.”

He didn’t say anything. He let the silence hold space for it.

“I saw a boy who was gonna be loud,” I said. “Like, colicky loud, the kind of baby that makes you walk the floor at three in the morning, bouncing him on your shoulder because he won’t settle for nothing else. And I saw a girl who was gonna be the opposite. Quiet. Watching everything. The kind of baby who makes you nervous because she’s too calm, and you keep checking to make sure she’s still breathing.”

“That’s her,” Amai said quietly. “That’s how she’s been on the scan. Still. Watching.”

I hadn’t thought about that—that some of what I’d imagined might already be true, might have been true this whole time, underneath everything, and I hadn’t known which parts of the picture were prophecy, and which parts were just a mother’s wishful invention.

“I saw them fighting over toys they didn’t even want until the other one touched it,” I said. “I saw them getting in trouble together and blaming each other, and both of them getting punished anyway because I wasn’t about to sit there playing detective with two toddlers. I saw them making up five minutes later like nothing happened, because that’s what siblings do, they fight and then they forget why.”