TWO HEARTBEATS

Alessia hadn't slept.

She'd spent the night in the guest room of the house that no longer felt like hers, staring at the ceiling, replaying a single sentence on a loop. *It doesn't matter anymore.* By morning she still had no idea what to do with those words, so she did the only thing left on her list. She went back to the specialist.

The waiting room felt smaller this time. Colder. She sat with her hands folded in her lap the way she had the day before, and when the nurse finally called her name, she stood on legs that didn't quite feel like her own.

Dr. Whitfield came in holding a folder, and something about his face was different from yesterday. Less careful. Almost gentle in a different way.

"Mrs. Sinclair." He sat across from her. "I have your results."

Alessia braced herself the way she'd learned to over five years of appointments like this one — expecting nothing, hoping anyway, hating herself a little for the hoping.

"You're pregnant."

The words didn't land right away. They hovered somewhere just outside her, the way the divorce papers had hovered the night before, too large to fit into the space her mind had made for them.

"I'm—" She stopped. Started again. "Say that again."

"You're pregnant, Alessia."

Five years. Five years of trying, of losing, of small deaths disguised as negative tests, and now, the day after her husband told her he didn't want her anymore, this.

She pressed a hand to her mouth. Tears came before she could stop them, and for once she didn't try to.

"There's something else," Dr. Whitfield said, and something in his tone made her go still. He turned the monitor toward her. "There are two heartbeats."

"Two." The word barely came out.

"Twins."

For thirty seconds — she would remember counting them later, though she couldn't have said why — Alessia felt something she hadn't let herself feel in years. Not hope. Something past hope. Something that felt dangerously close to joy.

Then she saw his face change again, and the joy went cold in her chest before he'd said a single word.

"Alessia, I need you to listen carefully." He set the folder down. "The exhaustion, the dizziness, the symptoms that brought you in yesterday — they weren't unrelated to this. You have a condition that's going to make this pregnancy high-risk. Significantly high-risk. I won't lie to you. There's a real chance you may not be able to carry both babies to term safely. There's a chance, if we're not careful, that you might not—"

He didn't finish the sentence. He didn't need to.

Joy. Fear. Grief, still fresh from the night before, all of it braided together so tightly Alessia couldn't separate one thread from another. She sat in the same chair where a doctor had once again told her something that would rearrange the rest of her life, and this time there was no name for what she was feeling. It wasn't one thing. It was everything, all at once, and none of it canceled the others out.

"What do I need to do," she finally said. Not a question. A demand for a plan, because a plan was the only thing she knew how to hold onto right now.

Dr. Whitfield talked. Monitoring. Specialists. Bed rest, likely, in the later months. Alessia heard perhaps half of it. The other half of her mind had already gone somewhere else — to a house she'd left that morning without her rings, to a man standing at a window with his back to her.

*I have to tell him.*

The thought arrived before she could stop it, before the hurt could catch up and remind her that he no longer wanted anything she had to give him. It didn't matter. He was still the father. Whatever he'd done to her last night, he deserved to know this.

She left the office and dialed his number in the parking lot, the autumn wind cutting through her coat.

It rang. And rang. And went to voicemail.

She tried again.

Nothing.

She stood there with the phone against her ear long after the second call had failed, some stubborn part of her still expecting him to pick up, still expecting yesterday to somehow undo itself if she just tried hard enough.

Her phone buzzed in her hand. Not Nikolia. Julian.

She almost let it go to voicemail too. Then something — instinct, maybe, or the particular dread of a phone ringing twice in one day — made her answer.

"Julian?"

"Alessia." His voice was wrong. Too tight, too careful, stripped of the easy warmth she was used to from him. "Where are you right now?"

"I'm — I just left an appointment. Julian, what's going on?"

A pause. Too long.

"Don't go anywhere," he said. "I'm coming to you."

"Julian, you're scaring me. What happened?"

He didn't answer. In the silence behind his breathing she could hear something else — voices, movement, the particular chaos of a room full of people who had all just learned something terrible at the same time.

"Julian—"

The television mounted above the pharmacy counter across the lot cut to a red banner before he could say another word.

BREAKING NEWS: SINCLAIR GLOBAL CHAIRMAN NIKOLIA SINCLAIR FEARED DEAD AFTER PRIVATE JET EXPLOSION.

Alessia stopped breathing.

The footage looped beneath the headline — a stretch of ocean, dark smoke rising off the water in a thin, obscene column, wreckage scattered across the waves like something torn apart by a hand too large to argue with. A reporter's voice, distant and clinical, was already using words like *catastrophic* and *no survivors reported at this time.*

"Alessia." Julian's voice, small and far away in her ear. "Alessia, are you still there?"

She didn't answer.

The phone slipped from her hand and cracked against the pavement, Julian's voice still calling her name from somewhere near her feet, and the last thing Alessia registered before the world tilted sideways and went dark at the edges was the word FEARED, burning red across every screen in the pharmacy window.

Feared dead.

Not confirmed.

Not yet.

But dead all the same, to a world that had already stopped waiting to find out — and to the two heartbeats inside her that he would never know existed.