تسجيل الدخولAna's POV I buried myself in work, because thinking about the baby hurt.It hurt in the good way and the bad way at once. So when the floor exploded into chaos at nine in the morning, I let it swallow me whole and was grateful for it."The Hendricks acquisition is dead," Doyle said, storming past my desk. "Dead. Their board just called an emergency session. We lose this, we lose the whole northern expansion."I was on my feet before I made up my mind to be.The war room was already loud when I got there.Six executives talking over each other, a wall of numbers on the screen that made no sense stacked the way they'd stacked them, and Caspian at the head of the table, jaw tight, listening to five different men tell him five different reasons the deal had collapsed overnight."Their legal team found a liability clause," one man was saying. "Buried in our own paperwork. They're using it to walk.""Then we renegotiate the clause.""There's no time, sir, their board votes in four hours…"
Caspian's POV "Run the test again," I said.The doctor's voice came back tired and patient down the line. "Mr. Strauss, we ran it twice this year already. The results are unchanged. They have been unchanged for six years. Running it a third time will tell us exactly what the first two told us.""Then tell me anyway.""The count is effectively zero. The motility is negligible. I'm sorry to keep saying it plainly, but you keep asking me to." A pause. "The likelihood of you fathering a child by natural means is, for all practical purposes, none. That hasn't moved. It is not going to move."I sat in the dark of my study and didn't fall apart.I've had six years to fall apart. I did all of it in the first year, alone, the way I do everything. So there's nothing left in me that flinches at the word."You've said that before," I said."I have. And every year you call me back and ask me to run it again, and every year I do, because you pay me to." His voice softened, which I didn't want. "Ca
Ana's POV ‘Dear Little One,I don't know how to start this. I've written a thousand marketing decks and I can't write four words to you.Here is the truth. You are not supposed to exist. A doctor told me two years ago that my body was broken, that there would never be a you. I believed him. I built my whole sad life on believing him.And here you are anyway. You didn't listen. I already love that about you.I don't know how to keep you safe yet. But I'm going to learn. I promise you that. Whatever it costs.Love, your mom.’I closed the notebook and held it against my chest and cried, quiet, so I wouldn't wake him.°°°°°°°°°°The sickness got harder to hide.So I learned to time it. I'd wake before him, slip to the far bathroom, be sick as quietly as I could, then brush my teeth and put my face back on and climb into bed like I'd only gone for water.I got good at it.But Emily has known me since we were nineteen, and Emily doesn't miss things.She showed up at a lunch I couldn't ca
Ana's POV After a long time, I got it open. I read the instructions three times even though a child could follow them, because reading them was a way of not doing the thing yet.Then there was nothing left to read.I took the test. I set it flat on the edge of the sink. And I stepped back and gripped the towel rail and stared at it like it might move."Three minutes," I whispered. "It's three minutes. You've survived worse than three minutes."They were the longest three minutes of my life.I didn't look at my phone. I looked at that small white stick and I counted my own heartbeats, and I thought about a doctor's voice saying ‘ruptured, not ever,’ and I thought about my husband letting go of my hand, and I thought about Nicole's mouth curving as she said ‘you're barren, Ana.’Just then the first line appeared. The control line. It always appears. It means nothing. I knew that and my heart still slammed against my ribs.I made myself look away. I counted to sixty, slow, my whole bo
Ana's POV I told myself it was nothing.That was the first thing I did, kneeling on that cold bathroom floor with Caspian's frightened eyes on mine. I felt the math start to add up and I reached out and shoved it back down before it could finish, the way you slam a door on a room you're not ready to see inside."It's stress," I said. "I've been under so much. The watcher. The fight. I'm run down, that's all.""You threw up at three in the morning.""People do that when they're exhausted." I let him help me up. I didn't meet his eyes. "I'm fine. Take me back to bed."He did. But he stared at me the rest of that night.°°°°°°°°°°I made it two more days on stress.Stress was a good word. It explained the sick mornings. It explained the way some smells suddenly turned my stomach, the coffee he brought me that I couldn't drink, the exhaustion that dropped on me at two in the afternoon like a weight.Stress explained everything, right up until the morning I stood in the shower and my han
Ana's POV The watcher went quiet.No flowers. No emails. The figure on the security footage was never named, the trail went cold the way careful trails do, and after three weeks of nothing, the fear that had lived in my chest slowly loosened its grip. Caspian kept looking. He told me that too, honestly, every dead end. But the world went still, and a person can't stay ready forever.So I let myself breathe.And the strange thing, the thing I didn't expect, was how good it got once I did."You're doing it wrong," I said."I am not doing it wrong. There's no wrong way to make eggs.""Caspian, there is smoke."He looked down at the pan like it had insulted him personally, and I laughed, really laughed, the kind that comes up out of nowhere, and he looked up at me with the eggs burning between us and something in his face went soft and stunned, like the sound of it was a thing he wanted to keep."Do that again," he said."Laugh?""Yes.""You can't order a laugh, that's not how they work
Caspian’s POV I knew her the second I walked through that door.I had told myself I wouldn't. I had told myself a man doesn't remember one face out of a crowded club, one night out of a hundred forgettable nights, one woman he left before the sun came up. I had told myself a lot of things on the f
Ana's POV I looked at the floor he wanted me to kneel on.Then I looked at my husband, sitting there so sure of himself, and I almost laughed."No," I said.His smile slipped. "Ana.""I will never kneel to her." My voice was steady now. The shaking was gone, burned clean out of me. "Keep your sign
Ana's POV I didn't leave the bedroom for three days.The curtains stayed closed. The phone stayed face down. I laid on top of the covers in the same robe and stared at the light on the ceiling, morning into evening into morning again.Sebastian didn't come home.Why would he? He had somewhere bett
Ana's POV I had been at my desk twenty minutes when HR walked in and shut the door behind her."Settling in?" she asked, but her eyes were doing something her smile wasn't."It's going as planned." I kept my voice light. "The launch timeline holds. I'll have the full rollout deck ready by Friday."







