LOGINFor a second I couldn’t make sense of what I was seeing.Damien Voss was on his knees on a clinic corridor floor with strangers somewhere behind him and a nurse frozen in the kind of silence people fall into when they know they are watching something they shouldn’t. He looked up at me like the rest of the building had fallen away, and the first thing I felt was not tenderness. It was panic so sharp it made my ears ring. If he stayed down there, if he made this even larger, I was going to break in a way I would not recover from cleanly.“Get up,” I said.My voice came out wrecked. He shook his head once, a small hard movement, and when he spoke the sound was so rough it barely resembled him.“Please don’t go through that door.”“Stop.”“Elena, please.” He swallowed. “I’m asking. I’m not telling you. I’m not blocking you with money or staff or any of that. I’m on the floor and I’m asking.”Tears spilled down my face so fast I tasted salt at the corner of my mouth. “You think this is wha
“Tell me I’m wrong,” he said again, as if repeating it could force the morning into a different shape.I looked at him and felt the corridor tilt. The nurse had stopped a few feet away, uncertain whether she was witnessing a private emergency or the beginning of something she would have to call security for. Behind Damien, near the reception end, a woman had paused with a form in her hands. Somebody else was pretending not to listen by staring too hard at the wall. All of that registered in a dull peripheral way while the main fact ate through everything else: he knew. He was here. The one thing I had left that belonged only to me had been broken open.“You’re not wrong,” I said. My voice came out thin and furious. “And you still shouldn’t be here.”Something in his face flinched at the confirmation, then hardened. “You were going to do this without telling me.”“Yes.”“Elena.”“What did you want me to do?” The tears were already up, burning and immediate. I hated them, hated that my
ELENA The corridor beyond the waiting room was narrower and quieter, lit in that flat clinical way that made everything feel slightly unreal. The woman in scrubs spoke as she walked, explaining something about the consultation first, about blood pressure, about not having to make any final decision before speaking with the doctor. I heard the shape of the sentences more than the content. My body had gone into a strange contained mode, one foot after the other, bag strap biting my shoulder, the knowledge of what I had come here to do sitting under my ribs like a held breath.We turned toward a side room.Behind us, at the far end of the corridor near reception, a man’s voice rose hard enough to cut through the quiet.I didn’t recognize it at first because it didn’t belong in this place. This place was forms and soft-soled shoes and people trying not to be seen. Then the voice came again, closer to a demand than a request, and my stomach dropped with such violence I actually stopped wa
DAMIEN By the time I got the car onto the main road the morning had already started without me, and that fact alone made every red light feel personal. Westbridge was across a stretch of the city I usually passed through without thinking, a corridor of ordinary buildings and early traffic and people with coffee in their hands who did not know they were sharing the street with a man trying not to be too late for a child he had only just learned existed. My mouth still tasted like metal from the fight. Marcus’s voice sat under everything else, repeating itself whether I wanted it to or not: this morning, this morning, this morning.I kept seeing Elena in pieces that refused to stay in the past where I had left them. The way she had gone pale in the office and called it nothing. The untouched food. The flinch on the waterfront when Marcus threw the rumor out like a joke. Her body angled away from me in the apartment, hand starting toward her stomach before she aborted the gesture. I ha
ELENAThe waiting room smelled like disinfectant and someone else’s cold coffee.I checked in with a voice that sounded borrowed, handed over my ID, signed where the receptionist told me to sign, and took the clipboard of forms to a seat near the wall because the middle of the room felt too exposed. A woman two chairs down scrolled through her phone with one earbud in. An older couple sat without speaking. Somewhere behind the desk a printer clicked and kept clicking. It was all so ordinary that for a moment I had the unreal sense I had walked into the wrong building and the universe had been too tired to stop me.The questions on the form were blunt in a way that made my hands go slow. Date of last period. Estimated weeks. Medical history. Emergency contact. I stared at that last line longer than the others and left it blank because every name I could put there made the morning feel even more impossible. Damien. Marcus. My mother. None of them belonged in that box for different and
I had not slept in any way that counted. At some point the chair by the window had taken the shape of my body and the city outside had gone from black to that thin, colorless pre-morning gray while my mind kept replaying the same useless stretch of hallway outside her door. The way she said she was done. The soft refusal to take the chain off. The fact that I had apologized through wood like a man who had already lost the right to be in the room. When the intercom started up, aggressive and insistent, I ignored it long enough to prove a point to nobody and then Marcus’s voice came through, frayed at the edges and looking for a fight.“Open the door, Damien. I’m not standing down here all morning.”I should have left him there. Instead I hit the release and waited with a kind of tired violence already gathering under my skin. He came in without asking, bringing the smell of a long night and that particular restless energy he got when something was eating him from the inside out. For







