The thing about almost

Alexandria’s POV

He went.

Thursday morning, nine am, a therapist’s office on the west side of the city that I hadn’t recommended and hadn’t asked about because it needed to be his choice completely or it meant nothing. He told me the night before, mentioned it the way you mention a work appointment — I have something at nine tomorrow — and I’d nodded and not made a thing of it because making a thing of it felt like the wrong move.

When he left the house Thursday morning in a jacket but no tie, which was apparently what Jamie Grayson wore to be emotionally vulnerable with a stranger, I stood at the kitchen window and watched the car pull out and felt something I hadn’t expected.

Scared.

Not of him going. Of hoping. Of the particular dangerous thing that happens when someone you’ve been protecting yourself from starts doing the right things and your defenses develop cracks you didn’t authorize.

I knew this feeling. I’d had a version of it at sixteen, watching him take his Gatorade without looking at me, and still showing up Thursday after Thursday. I’d had it at twenty-one at the altar, telling myself the fact that he’d chosen me at all was enough. I’d had it every time in five years he’d done one human thing in the middle of a long stretch of coldness and I’d let it reset my entire internal clock.

I was not going to do that again.

That was the thing I kept having to remind myself. The book on the nightstand and the crackers restocked and the therapy appointment on a Thursday — none of it erased the hospital bed. None of it gave back the miscarriage he’d walked away from. None of it un-bought Kendrick’s company or un-monitored my phone or un-said you’re a liability at a table full of people who would remember it.

It was a beginning, possibly. If it was real.

But I’d been fooled by beginnings before.

I called Kendrick.

Not from the burner — that felt unnecessary now, like a prop from a different chapter of this. From my actual phone, sitting on the garden bench in the morning sun with my feet on the warm stone, one hand resting on my stomach without thinking.

He picked up on the third ring.

“Alex.” His voice was careful. He knew about the acquisition. Jamie had said he’d bought the company eight months ago and Kendrick was not a man who didn’t know who owned what he’d built.

“Hi,” I said.

A pause. “Are you okay?”

“I’m still here,” I said. “Which I know isn’t the update you were expecting.”

“I wasn’t expecting any specific update.” Another pause. “I heard you tried to leave.”

“Who told you that.”

“Nobody. I just—” He exhaled. “I know you, Alex. I figured when I didn’t hear from you that something had changed.”

I looked out at the garden. The jasmine was doing what jasmine did, relentlessly alive, the dark patch in the grass from two weeks ago already mostly gone. Things recovered. That was the annoying thing about gardens.

“He knows about Vera Mills,” I said.

“I assumed.”

“He read the articles.” I paused. “He said they were good.”

Silence on Kendrick’s end. Then, quietly, “Of course he did.”

“He’s having the rights transferred back to me. Legally. His lawyer is handling it.”

“Alex.” His voice had shifted into something gentler and more direct, the way it got when he was about to say something I needed to hear but hadn’t asked for. “What are you doing.”

“I don’t know yet,” I said honestly.

“He bought my company to control your exit route.”

“I know.”

“He monitored your phone.”

“I know that too.”

“And you’re still—”

“I’m still here, Kendrick. I know how it looks.” I pressed my free hand against my knee. “I know what you’d tell me if I were someone else describing this situation. I’d tell me the same thing.”

“Then why—”

“Because I’m pregnant,” I said.

The line went very quiet.

“Ten weeks,” I said. “It’s his. Before you—it’s his.”

“Alex.” Just my name, softly, with about fifteen different things inside it.

“I’m not staying because of the baby,” I said quickly, because I needed that to be clear to at least one person in my life. “I’m staying because I haven’t decided to go yet. Those are different things and I need them to stay different.”

He was quiet for a moment. “Are you safe?”

“Yes.”

“Is he—has he—”

“No,” I said. “Not like that. Never like that.” And that was true. Whatever Jamie was, whatever damage he’d done, it had never been that. “He’s just—he’s doing things differently right now and I’m watching to see if it’s real and I genuinely don’t know yet.”

“And if it is real?”

I looked at the jasmine. “Then I’ll have to figure out if real is enough. If there’s enough of me left to—” I stopped. “I fell out of love with him, Kendrick. Or I thought I did. And now I’m not sure what I fell out of and what I just buried because it was easier than carrying it.”

He let that sit for a moment. That was what I’d always valued about Kendrick — he didn’t rush to fill silence with comfort.

“Whatever you decide,” he said finally. “I’m on your side. Even if the company he owns used to be mine.”

I almost smiled. “How are you about that, actually.”

“Furious,” he said pleasantly. “But managing.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. It was a good company. He paid well.” A pause. “Your articles are the best thing that came out of it. I’m glad he’s giving them back.”

We talked for another few minutes about nothing important — a book he was reading, a restaurant that had opened near his office, the ordinary texture of a friendship that had survived things that should have ended it. When I hung up I sat in the garden for a while longer, face tipped up to the Vegas sun, letting it be warm without reading anything into it.

Jamie came home at noon.

He didn’t tell me how it went. He came into the garden, saw me on the bench, and sat down beside me. Not close. Just beside. He loosened his collar and looked at the jasmine and we sat in silence for a while and the silence was different from all the other silences this house had held.

After a while he said, “It was harder than I expected.”

“Therapy?”

“Yes.”

“That usually means it’s working,” I said.

He considered that. Nodded once.

We sat in the garden until the sun moved and the stone went cool beneath us and neither of us suggested going inside first.

It wasn’t love, what was happening between us.

Or maybe it was, just a different kind — the fragile provisional kind that hasn’t decided yet whether it’s a beginning or an ending.

I was trying very hard not to decide for it.