Romans de Olivia Oscarlyn

He said it and walked away. That was the thing I kept coming back to, turning over in the quiet of the next two days like a stone you keep picking up because you haven't decided yet whether to put it in your pocket or throw it into the water. So do I. Three words delivered in a hallway and then he was gone, and I had stood there with my hand on my stomach and my heart doing something irregular and absolutely no idea what I was supposed to do with the information. I did not bring it up. Neither did he. We existed around it the way you exist around something large that has been placed in the middle of a room, navigating the edges of it, pretending it is not taking up the space that it is. Breakfast happened. The doctor came again, listened to two heartbeats, said everything was progressing well and looked at Luca's list of questions with the expression of someone who had not expected to be quite this prepared. Dinner happened. The compound was quiet in the way it had been since May

Bryan called for eleven minutes. I know because my phone showed me afterward, when I was sitting in the dark holding it against my chest and trying to locate the part of myself that had always known exactly how she felt about Bryan Rollins and figure out why it was suddenly harder to find than it used to be. He had called to check in. That was what he said, right at the start, his voice doing that thing it did when he was being careful, steady and warm and not asking for anything directly because Bryan never asked for things directly, he just made himself available and waited and trusted that you would find your way to him eventually. He asked if I was okay. I said yes and meant it more than I had expected to. He asked if I was eating. I almost laughed, because Luca had asked me the same thing three hours ago and the fact that the two men in my life led with food when they were worried about me was either very funny or very telling and I had not decided which yet. He asked about

I didn't come down for dinner. I told myself it was because I wasn't hungry, which was partially true. The rest of the truth was that I had spent the last two hours sitting on the edge of a bed that was becoming mine in the slow, reluctant way that things become yours when you don't have a choice, and I was not ready to sit across a table from Luca Wolfe and pretend that the conversation we'd just had in that hallway hadn't rearranged something inside me that I didn't know how to put back. I was not in love with him. I was standing at the edge of something that looked, from certain angles, in certain light, disturbingly like the beginning of it. And the difference between those two things was becoming harder to hold onto with every day I spent in this house. There was a knock at the door. One knock, because Luca only ever knocked once, and then it opened anyway. I did not look up from the window. "You need to eat," he said. "People keep telling me that today." He set somethin

The car did not come in. It sat at the gate for exactly three minutes, engine running, and then it left the same way it had arrived, slowly, deliberately, without hurry, in the way of things that want to be remembered. Luca stood at the window and watched it go and none of us said anything because the silence he was radiating was the kind that discouraged words. Then he turned around and said, very calmly, that we needed to go inside and that everything was fine, and I had now known him long enough to understand that when Luca Wolfe said everything was fine he meant that everything was under control, which was not the same thing and never had been. My mom had had enough. I watched it happen in real time, the moment her patience with being in a house she didn't understand, in a situation nobody had explained to her properly, with a man who answered direct questions with technically accurate non answers, finally ran out completely. She set her glass down on the counter and looked a

The phone call lasted four minutes. I know because I counted. Standing in the driveway with my mom's hand in mine and Maya's eyes still fixed on the ultrasound images and the folder shaking slightly in my grip, I counted every second of the silence that had fallen over the compound the moment Luca answered that call and his whole body changed. Not dramatically. Not the way it happened in films, where someone gets bad news and staggers or drops things or makes a sound. Luca Wolfe did not do any of those things. He simply went still in a way that was different from his usual stillness, turned slightly away from all of us, and spoke in a voice so low I could not make out a single word from where I was standing. Four minutes. Then he hung up. He stood with his back to us for a moment longer than was necessary. Just a breath. Just one. Then he turned around and his face was exactly what it always was and I would not have known anything had changed except that I had been watching

The clinic was nothing like I expected. I don't know what I had been imagining something cold, maybe, something that matched the house and the gun on the counter and the general aesthetic of Luca Wolfe's life, all steel surfaces and the absence of warmth. Instead it was a private practice forty minutes from the compound, small and quiet and decorated in the kind of muted colours that were designed to make people feel calm, which was doing absolutely nothing for me personally. A receptionist who didn't look up when we walked in. A waiting room with two other people in it who didn't look at us either. Luca had called ahead. Of course he had. We were seen within four minutes of arriving. I changed into the gown they gave me and sat on the edge of the examination table and looked at the ultrasound machine in the corner and thought about the fact that in approximately five minutes I was going to see, on a screen, the two lives that had detonated mine. That they were going to stop b