What the follow up found

Alexandria’s POV

The clinic was on the quieter side of the city.

Not the hospital I’d woken up in alone — I couldn’t go back there. I’d found this place three weeks ago when I’d first started suspecting, a small private practice tucked between a law firm and a dry cleaner on a street that didn’t care about my last name. The receptionist hadn’t recognized me. That had been the whole point.

I took a cab. Not the house car, not anything Jamie could track through a driver who reported to Sarah’s organizational system. A regular cab, paid in cash, window down the whole ride because the morning air was the only thing keeping the nausea at a manageable distance.

He hadn’t followed me.

I kept checking. Old habit at this point — scanning for familiar faces, familiar cars, the particular feeling of being watched that I had apparently been living inside for over a year without knowing it. But the street behind the cab was just a street. Either he was giving me genuine space or he’d gotten better at hiding it and I had no way of knowing which.

Both options were exhausting.

Dr. Osei was a small, precise woman in her fifties with reading glasses she kept pushing up her nose and a manner that was efficient without being cold. She had been the one to confirm the pregnancy three weeks ago. She looked at me now across her desk with the kind of professional patience that didn’t require you to be okay.

“The bleeding episode,” she said, reviewing the notes from the hospital. “Any recurrence since?”

“No.”

“Pain?”

“Some. Dull. Mostly in the mornings.”

“Nausea?”

“Yes. This morning was bad.”

She nodded, made a note. “That’s consistent with where you are. Ten to eleven weeks, the nausea often peaks before it starts to ease.” She looked up. “Are you eating?”

“Trying.”

“Sleeping?”

I almost laughed. “Not really.”

She studied me for a moment in the way doctors do when they’re deciding whether to ask the question that isn’t on the form. “Is your home environment stable? Stress levels?”

“I’m working on it,” I said, which was the truest answer I could give without sitting in her office for three hours.

She accepted it without pushing. I appreciated that about her. She talked me through the results from the tests I’d done at the hospital — everything looked okay, the bleeding had been a warning rather than a crisis, the baby was where it should be. She handed me a printed sheet of instructions and a referral for a proper scan.

“Eight weeks from now,” she said. “Sooner if anything changes.”

I folded the referral and put it in my bag. Eight weeks. In eight weeks I needed to have figured out where I was going to be and who I was going to be doing this with and how much of the truth I was ready to say out loud.

Eight weeks felt both very long and very short.

I sat in the cab on the way home with the folded referral in my bag and the scan photo the hospital had printed — small and grainy, more suggestion than image, but real — and I thought about my mother.

She had raised me alone from the time I was nine. My father hadn’t left dramatically, hadn’t cheated or fought or made an exit worth remembering. He’d just gradually become less present until one day he wasn’t there at all, like a plant that dies so slowly you don’t notice until it’s completely gone. My mother had never complained about it. She’d worked two jobs and kept the house warm and made sure I never felt the specific shape of his absence if she could help it.

I had spent my entire adolescence determined not to repeat that. Determined to find someone who stayed, who was present, who chose you loudly enough that you never had to wonder.

And then I had fallen in love with Jamie Grayson, who was present in every way except the one that mattered.

The irony of it sat in my chest like a stone.

He was home when I got back.

I could tell before I even opened the door — his car was in the drive and there was the particular energy the house had when he was in it, a kind of charged stillness, like the air pressure changed slightly.

He was in the kitchen. Again. This was becoming a pattern — Jamie Grayson, who had an office the size of most people’s apartments and a company worth billions, haunting our kitchen in the middle of the day like he didn’t know what else to do with himself.

He looked up when I came in.

“How was it,” he said.

“Fine.” I set my bag on the counter. “Everything is fine.”

He nodded. He was holding a mug and not drinking from it and I was starting to think the mug was a prop — something for his hands to do when the rest of him didn’t know how to behave.

“Jamie,” I said.

“You don’t have to tell me anything,” he said quickly. “I’m not — I’m not asking. I just wanted to know you were okay.”

I looked at him. At his carefully managed expression and his prop mug and the way he was keeping himself on the far side of the island like he’d drawn a line and was holding it.

And I was so tired.

Not angry-tired. Not the exhausted resentment that had been fueling me for months. Just genuinely, deeply tired of carrying this secret in a body that was already doing so much work.

“I’m pregnant,” I said.

The words hit the kitchen air and stayed there.

His mug came down on the counter slowly. His face did something complicated and enormous that he didn’t try to control for once, and I watched him absorb it — all of it, the weight of it, the timing of it, everything it meant — in real time.

Then his eyes dropped to my stomach, just briefly, and came back up to my face.

“How long,” he said. His voice came out rough.

“Ten weeks.”

He was very still.

“That night—” he started.

“Yes,” I said.

The kitchen held both of us. The mug on the counter. The referral in my bag. The grainy scan photo I hadn’t shown him and wasn’t sure I was ready to.

He opened his mouth.

And what came out wasn’t what I expected.

“Are you okay?” he said. “Are you okay. Not the—just you. Are you okay.”

I looked at him for a long moment.

“No,” I said honestly. “Not really.”

He nodded once, slowly, like that answer was something he could work with. Like honesty was a language he was just beginning to learn and he was paying very close attention to every word.