Page 4 of Pregnant By A Rich Demon 4

My throat closed around the next part, but I pushed through it. “I saw their first Christmas. I had the whole thing pictured in my head—two stockings, both of them too little to understand what was happening, both of them just excited about the paper. I saw me exhausted out of my mind because two babies is not double the work, it’s like ten times the work. Everybody tells you that, and I saw myself so tired I could barely stand, and I didn’t care. I wanted that. I wanted to be that tired for them.”

Amai reached over slowly and found my hand in the dark. He didn’t pull it anywhere. He just held it, his thumb moving once across my knuckles, and waited to see if I wanted more than that.

I let him keep it.

“That’s the part nobody tells you about losing somebody you never met,” I said. “It’s not just him. It’s not just the one baby. It’s everything I built around having two. The version of me who was gonna be a mother to twins—she’s gone too. I don’t know who I am now. I know how to be scared for one baby. I don’t know yet how to just be scared for one when I spent months being scared for two.”

“You don’t have to know yet,” he said.

“I feel like I’m supposed to be less sad because she’s okay. Like there’s some math where her being fine should cancel out some of what I feel about him being gone. And it doesn’t. It’s not less. It’s just both. All the way. At the same time.”

“Both is allowed,” Amai said, and something in the plainness of it broke something else open in me, because it was the first time in weeks that somebody had said something to me that wasn’t trying to manage me toward a particular feeling.

I cried the way I hadn’t let myself cry in the doctor’s office, because in the doctor’s office, I’d still been performing composure for Kaisen’s benefit, for the nurse’s benefit, and for my own benefit, so I wouldn’t fall apart in front of strangers. Here, in the dark, with Amai’s hand still holding mine and not trying to pull me anywhere, I didn’t perform anything. I just let it come, ugly, loud, and unashamed, and he stayed there through all of it. He didn’t check the clock. He didn’t try to talk me through it faster. He didn’t tell me it would get easier, or that time healed things, or any of the soft, useless sentences people reach for when they can’t stand to sit inside somebody else’s pain without trying to shrink it.

When it slowed down, when my breathing evened out into something less ragged, he finally spoke again.

“You want me to hold you, or you want space?”

He asked instead of assumed.

“Hold me,” I said.

He pulled me in then, careful, like he was still asking permission with every inch. I let my head rest against his chest and felt his heartbeat under my ear, steady, alive, one single rhythm.

I thought about her. Our daughter. Somewhere in me right now, still, curled up and unaware that her brother had ever existed at all, unaware that she’d absorbed some part of him into the very cells that were building her heart, her lungs, the small hands she didn’t have yet. I didn’t resent my baby, but this was a hard pill to swallow. I loved her exactly as much as I had five hours ago, before any of this. But loving her didn’t erase the other love, the one with nowhere left to go, the one I’d built around a boy I never got to meet and now never would.

Both were true. I was learning to let them live in the same body without one of them winning.

Amai’s hand moved slowly over my back, not trying to soothe it out of me, just staying there, present, solid, a weight I could lean into without him asking anything of me in return.

“I came here with two,” I whispered into his chest, more to myself than to him. “I’m going to leave with one.”

He didn’t correct me. He didn’t remind me she was still coming, still real, still enough. He just held on tighter and let the truth of it sit exactly where it was.

I must have dozed off somewhere in the middle of my own exhaustion, because when I opened my eyes again, the room had changed temperature, the way rooms do when a body leaves them. I reached out on instinct before I even understood why, and my hand found cool sheets where Amai should have been.

I lay there a second, blinking at the dark, doing the math my body always did before my mind caught up. Not gone. Just not here. There was a difference, and pregnancy had taught me the difference mattered more than it used to.

I found him in the room down the hall, sitting in a chair. The overhead light was off. The only light came from his phone, held low in his lap, throwing a pale wash up over his face.

He didn’t hear me in the doorway. Or he heard me and didn’t have anything left over to react with. I've recognized the difference, too, lately.

I could see, from the angle I was standing, what was on the screen. The ultrasound image. Not the new one—the old one, awhile back, before everything narrowed down to one. Two gray shapes instead of one. He had it zoomed in on something, his thumb moving in a small, absent circle over the glass like he could smooth the picture into something else if he touched it long enough.

“Hey,” I said quietly, so it wouldn’t hit him like a door opening.

His head came up. He didn’t try to hide the phone, which told me something. A version of him from months ago would have locked the screen before I even got the word out.

“Didn’t mean to wake you,” he said.

“You didn’t.” I came in and sat on the arm of the chair, not in his lap, not folded into him the way I might have on a different night. Just close. “Couldn’t sleep?”

“I slept fine.” A pause. “Woke up and needed to look at something.”

I glanced down at the screen again. Two shapes. One heartbeat each, back then, before the world decided otherwise.

“I keep doing the same thing,” I admitted. “Looking at it like it’s gonna show me something different if I look long enough.”