Page 82 of Pregnant By A Rich Demon 4

There was a silence on the recording, long enough that I could hear the ambient hum of the hospital room fill it. I found myself holding my breath the same way, waiting for Amai’s answer like it mattered to me, which it did, though not for the reasons he’d assume if he knew I was listening.

“I don’t know,” Amai said finally. “Grief makes people say all kinda shit they don’t mean to say. Or it make ’em finally say the shit they been meaning to say the whole time and just ain’t had the nerve.” A pause. “I can’t tell which one that was.”

Or it make ’em finally say the shit they been meaning to say the whole time and just ain’t had the nerve.

I sat back against the headrest, and something in my veins went warm and cold at the same time, because even Amai—even Amai, standing in that room with all his suspicion and all his hatred for me—had landed on the same possibility I’d been circling since the second the words left my mouth. He didn’t know which version was true. But he’d said it out loud. He’d given voice to the idea that maybe, underneath all the grief-talk, I’d finally said something real.

“I don’t fully trust it either,” Truth said. “But I also feel like shit for assuming the worst the second he walked in. Before he even said anything. I looked at that man standing in the doorway with balloons, and my first thought was ‘what the fuck does he want,’ like he came here with a knife instead of a teddy bear.”

That landed different than I expected it to. I’d known Truth was suspicious of me—had known it for months, honestly, since Amai first turned her against every version of events I tried to give her. But hearing her say it out loud, unfiltered, with nobody performing for anybody, hit a nerve I didn’t know was still exposed. If I didn’t know any better, I’d think she wasn’t fuckin’ with me anymore.

What the fuck does he want?

That’s how she’d looked at me. That’s what had been sitting behind her eyes the whole time I stood in that doorway smiling and holding balloons like a fool.

I made myself breathe through it, because getting angry wasn’t going to help me understand what came next. And what came next, I told myself, was more important than my pride.

“That instinct ain’t wrong just ’cause it feels mean,” Amai said. “You been through enough with that man to earn being suspicious of him walking through a door.”

Being suspicious of him. Of me. Like I was a threat to be managed instead of a man who’d lost a child, standing in a room full of people who’d never once stopped to ask if I was okay.

I let that sink into the growing pile of evidence I was building, because it was evidence, whether Amai understood it as such or not. Truth’s first instinct—her raw, unguarded instinct—was fear and suspicion toward me. And whose fault was that? Not mine. I hadn’t given her a single reason in that room to be afraid. I’d brought gifts. I’d asked permission. I’d been humble, respectful, gracious even, when Amai put his hand flat against my chest like I was something dangerous. The fear she carried into that room wasn’t organic. It had been built, brick by brick, over three months of Amai poisoning every conversation they’d ever had about me. He’d told her I was dangerous. He’d told her I couldn’t be trusted. He’d shot me in front of her own house to prove a point, and then he’d spent every day since reinforcing the same lesson until it became reflex in her, something she reached for before she even had time to think.

That wasn’t Truth failing to see me clearly. That was Amai’s manipulation working exactly as designed.

I closed my eyes.

She saw it. Even filtered through all of Amai’s poison, even scared and suspicious, the way he’d trained her to be, some part of her had looked at me standing over that bassinet and recognized what was true underneath everything: I belonged there. My instincts around that child weren’t foreign or invented. They were the instincts of a man who had spent nine months building a life around a child he believed, all the way down in his bones, was his.

Amai didn’t respond right away, and I found myself leaning forward again, waiting.

“You want the balloons moved somewhere you don’t gotta look at ’em?” he asked, and something about the deflection—the way he changed the subject rather than engage with what Truth had just said—told me he didn’t have an answer for it either. He couldn’t refute what she’d noticed because it was true, and a man who can’t refute the truth changes the subject instead.

“No,” Truth said. “Leave ’em. They’re for her. Don’t got nothing to do with whatever’s going on in his head.”

Whatever’s going on in his head. I let that phrase sit for a second, turning it over, and I decided—generously, that she meant it as an open question rather than a closed accusation. She wasn’t saying something was wrong with me. She was saying she didn’t yet understand what was going on with me, and that not-yet-understanding was itself an invitation. People don’t wonder about men they’ve already dismissed. She was wondering. That meant something was still open between us that Amai hadn’t fully managed to close.

“You sure?” Amai asked.

“I’m sure.” The sound of the bed shifting, blankets moving. “Grief makes people do strange shit, Amai. I know that better than anybody right now. Don’t mean every strange thing somebody does is a threat.”

Don’t mean every strange thing somebody does is a threat.

There it was. The thing I’d been listening for without knowing exactly what shape it would take when it finally arrived. Truth—raw, exhausted, twelve hours postpartum, grieving a son she’d never met while holding the daughter who survived him—was defending me. Not loudly. Not with any romantic intention behind it, I understood that much, understood she wasn’t declaring some secret feelings for me that contradicted her life with Amai. But she was standing between me and Amai’s suspicion, holding a small, deliberate line that said: don’t assume the worst about this man just because you want to.

That’s compassion. That’s the kind of grace a person only extends to somebody they still see as fundamentally worth protecting, even against their own partner’s instincts.

“And if it is?” Amai asked.

I gripped the steering wheel a little tighter, waiting.

There was a long pause on the recording—long enough that I imagined Truth’s face in that silence, imagined her weighing something the way she used to weigh things with me back when we still talked without an audience, back before Amai turned every conversation into a chess match he had to win.

“Then we deal with it when it’s actually a problem,” she said finally. “Not before.”

I exhaled slowly through my nose.

Not before.