Chapter 8: The Clinic

ROSE 𓆩♡𓆪

The guest room was so big I almost mistook it for the main room when I first opened my eyes.

The curtains ran all the way from the ceiling to the floor,  thick, heavy, the kind that blocked out the world completely. 

The air conditioner had been running all night and at some point in the small hours I had pulled the blanket up to my chin and forgotten, just for a moment, that I had nowhere to be or anything to carry.

Then my hand moved to my belly.

And my mind came back online.

You’re pregnant. You’re in a stranger’s house. And the man whose child you’re carrying looked at you yesterday like you were a problem he was being forced to manage.

I stared at the ceiling.

I knew it was too good to be true to relax.

The room was beautiful and enormous and completely foreign and none of that changed the fact that I had no idea what Alex Christopher was going to decide when he woke up this morning. I had no plan beyond yesterday’s gate. I had arrived at the end of my plan and was now simply waiting to find out what came next.

That was not a comfortable feeling.

I lay there for a while longer,  not sleeping, just existing, and then a knock came at the door.

I hesitated. I didn’t live here. I had no framework yet for who knocked on doors in this house or what it meant when they did. One thing I was certain of, it wasn’t Alex. Alex would send someone before he came himself. That much I had already understood about him.

I got up and opened the door.

A woman stood in the corridor holding a breakfast tray with both hands and smiling with the specific warmth of someone who means it. She was compact and neat, with the bearing of a person who had been running things competently for a long time and had no need to announce it.

“Good morning, Rose,” she said. “My name is Mrs. Baako. I am the head of staff here.”

“Good morning, ma,” I said, and opened the door wider because she was clearly going to need somewhere to put the tray.

She came in and set it on the small table by the window and began arranging it with the practiced efficiency of someone who had done this ten thousand times. The smell of the food reached me before I could think about whether I was hungry, warm bread, something with eggs, tea with steam still rising from the cup.

My stomach responded before the rest of me did.

“Please sit,” she said, gesturing to the chair. “You need to eat.”

I sat. She served me with the same unhurried care she had used to arrange everything, and I watched her hands and thought about my late mother,  the way she used to set food in front of me like it was the most important thing she could do at that moment.

“I know how you might be feeling right now,” Mrs. Baako said, stepping back. “But you are going to be fine. Eventually.”

I looked up at her.

She said it simply, without performance, the way people say things when they mean them rather than when they are trying to make you feel better. Something in my chest loosened slightly, just slightly, just enough to breathe a little deeper than I had been.

“Thank you, Mrs. Baako,” I said. “I needed to hear that.”

She tapped me once on the back, firm, brief, maternal, and left.

I ate everything on the tray.

I hadn’t realized how hungry I was until the food was in front of me and then I couldn’t stop. I ate slowly, deliberately, looking out the window at the garden below, green and manicured and entirely peaceful in the way that gardens are when they belong to people who have never had to worry about anything as immediate as breakfast.

When I finished I went to the bathroom and showered like it might be the last time I had access to hot water and proper pressure, because I genuinely did not know what Alex’s next decision looked like or whether it included me remaining in this house beyond today.

 I stood under the water longer than necessary and let it be warm and real and present and tried not to think too far ahead.

I was dressed and sitting on the edge of the bed when one of the staff knocked and told me the doctor was waiting downstairs.

He was in the sitting room with a large case at his feet, the kind that suggested he had brought considerably more equipment than a standard house call required. He stood when I came in and extended his hand.

“Good morning, Rose. I am Doctor Charles. Please come with me to the clinic.”

I didn’t know there was an in-house clinic. I followed him down a corridor I hadn’t been down before and into a room that was small and clean and smelled faintly of antiseptic — a proper examination room, fully equipped, built into the house like it had always been there.

He showed me his identification before he did anything else. Held it out and waited for me to read it properly, which I did, which I appreciated more than I could say.

“Rose, I want you to feel comfortable throughout,” he said. “Tell me immediately if anything feels wrong.”

I nodded and lay back on the examination bed and looked at the ceiling and breathed carefully while he worked. He applied something cold to my stomach, a gel, connected to a small handheld device attached to the monitor beside the bed, and moved it slowly, adjusting the angle, his eyes on the screen rather than on me.

I had seen things like this in movies. The grainy image on the monitor. The doctor’s face when something appeared.

I turned my head and looked at the screen.

There was something there, two something, side by side, small and certain and undeniable.

The doctor moved the device slightly and both images sharpened.

I looked at them for a long moment without speaking.

A part of me felt something warm move through my chest,  something that had no business being warm given everything surrounding it, but arrived anyway and didn’t apologize. I was going to be a mother. Whatever else was true, whatever else was broken or frightening or uncertain,  that was true too.

The circumstances were louder than the feeling.

But the feeling was there.

Doctor Charles finished the examination, wiped the gel from my stomach, and helped me sit up. He went to his laptop and typed for a moment, sending something, I realized. A message. A report. Something that was going to travel faster than I could walk back up those stairs.

I came out of the clinic and found Alex in the corridor.

His head was bent over his phone. Reading something. His expression was unreadable in the way his expressions usually were  controlled, closed, giving nothing away freely. But when he looked up and his eyes met mine, I saw it.

He knew.

Not just that I was pregnant. The duration. The timing. The two weeks that pointed directly and unambiguously back to one night and one person.

He knew all of it.

We looked at each other for a moment without speaking.

Then he turned and walked back toward his study and I stood in the corridor alone and pressed my hand flat against my stomach and told the two small certainties inside me quietly, just for them  that I was going to figure this out.

I didn’t know how yet.

But I was going to figure it out.