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No one is coming. That’s the point.

I sit on the closed lid of the toilet and read the instructions three times, because my hands are shaking too hard to hold the paper still. Then I do what the box says, set the test face down on the edge of the sink, and set a timer on my phone.

Three minutes.

I make myself count backward.

The pill pack in my purse with the row still full. The week Mark ended things, when I forgot everything, including how to sleep. The night on the rooftop. I’m on birth control, I told him, and I believed it. The bra that stopped fitting at the shop in Montauk. The clams I couldn’t stomach. Kiersten’s perfect cappuccino that smelled like something rotting. The shoulder of the expressway, in the rain, three hours ago.

A period that is now more than two weeks late.

Stress, I kept telling myself. This month, I’ve earned it.

The timer goes off. I don’t move.

For a long moment, I just look at the little plastic rectangle lying face down beside the soap dish, and I think: as long as I don’t turn it over, it isn’t real. I can stay in this second forever. I can still be a woman who’s only had her heart broken.

I turn it over.

Two pink lines.

I take the second test. Two pink lines. I take the third, the digital one, because I’m a woman who has never trusted a single source in her life.

Pregnant.

The word sits on the little gray screen like it has every right to be there.

I slide off the toilet onto the bathroom floor. The tile is cold through my wet dress. I pull my knees up to my chest and stare at the three tests lined up on the edge of the sink like witnesses.

His child.

The first thing I feel isn’t fear. It’s something so fierce and so tender that it takes my breath away, a warmth spreading out from the center of me like I’ve swallowed a sunrise. There’s a person in there. A tiny, impossible person who didn’t ask for any of this.

Then the fear comes, and it comes all at once.

No wife. No kids. No family Christmas card. I hear him saying it on the rooftop with that almost-smile, the night we didn’t exchange names. Whatever my family is, it ends with me.

I’m never having a family, Isabella. I won’t do to a child what my father did to me. Across a café table, with a calm that told me he’d made that vow long before he met me and had never once reconsidered it.

And tonight. Tonight, I watched him sit in his father’s chair, under his father’s portrait, and choose the crown over two innocent men. I watched the man who held me on the beach become the man who raised him in the space of a single conversation.

If he can sacrifice two strangers to protect the King name, what would a baby be to him?

A liability to be managed. A scandal to be buried.

Or worse, an heir. Something to mold. Something to sit in that study one day while a man in an expensive suit tells a child he will never be enough.

I press both hands flat against my stomach.

“No,” I whisper to the empty bathroom. “Not you. Never you.”

Then I think about my mother.

My mother was twenty-two when she found out she was pregnant with me, by a man who told her he loved her and left anyway. I grew up inside the wreckage of that choice. I learned to read the weather in her face before I could read books. I learned that love was something you earned and could lose without warning, and that men were a storm you survived.

I swore I’d never be her. Every careful choice I made, every man I sent away, every year I waited, it was all so I would never end up on a bathroom floor, pregnant by a man who’d already told me exactly who he was.

And here I am.