CHAPTER THREE: The Night I Stopped Waiting.

CHAPTER THREE: The Night I Stopped Waiting.

POV: Seraphina

Jade was sitting at my kitchen table as if she owned it, her head thrown back, laughing at something Eleanor said, wine glass in hand, free hand resting flat against my tablecloth like she had eaten at this table a hundred times before, and I stood at the doorway for three full seconds before anyone in that room noticed I had come home.

Three seconds in your own house.

Eleanor was leaning toward her the way a flower leans toward the only window in the room, her whole body open and warm, her voice were soft and full of genuine delight, and I stood there watching her give this woman in one evening everything she had refused to give me in three years of sitting at that same table.

Nobody looked up.

The sound of my bag hitting the counter finally pulled Damian's eyes across the room, and I watched his face do the thing it always did when he knew he had no clean defence, a quick tightening around the eyes, a shift in the jaw, something that wanted to be guilty but couldn't quite commit.

He was at my side quickly with his voice already low.

"Sera, I know this isn't ideal, my mother confirmed it before I could stop her; it's just one dinner."

I looked at him standing there in his pressed collar and his clean shoes, a man who had made himself presentable for this evening, for this woman, in my house, and was now offering me management instead of an apology.

Just one dinner.

I nodded and walked to my seat.

For three hours, I was perfect.

I refilled glasses before they emptied, laughed at the right moments, cleared plates without being asked, and watched Eleanor ask Jade about Paris with a warmth in her voice I had spent three years trying to earn at this table without ever once finding it.

"Jade, you always had such a sharp instinct for these things."

Damian looked at his plate.

I looked at Damian.

Then Jade leaned across the corner of the table to show him something on her phone, and her shoulder pressed into his arm, and he did not pull away immediately. He sat in that small point of contact for one breath too long, just one, and something inside my chest closed quietly the way a window closes when nobody else in the room can feel the cold.

I pressed two fingers to my temple after dessert, said I had a headache, and walked upstairs on legs that felt very steady because they had to be.

I locked the bathroom door and stood with my back against it and listened to her laughter coming up through the ceiling of my own home.

Then I opened the cabinet under the spare towels.

The white stick was where I had left it two weeks ago, pushed to the very back behind a bar of soap, still in the brown paper bag from the pharmacy three streets over, where I had paid cash because I was not ready for it to be real inside these walls, not while everything in this house was already too heavy to carry.

I sat on the edge of the counter and looked at the two lines I had been avoiding.

My hand moved before I told it to, pressing flat against my stomach, and I sat in that locked bathroom above a table where another woman was laughing in my chair, and I felt the particular loneliness of holding the most wonderful news of my life in a place that had gone completely cold around me.

A baby.

His baby, already there, already growing quietly, while I was downstairs being a perfect wife for people who had never once seen me clearly.

I pressed my palm flat and made that small thing a promise that things were going to change, that I was going to make them change, that I was not going to raise a child inside a house where the woman carrying it had been completely erased.

The pain pulled me out of sleep at 3 am.

It was sharp, deep, wrong in a way my body understood before my mind could catch up, and I already knew before I even sat up, the way you know some things before anyone has to say them out loud.

Damian was beside me with his back turned.

I dressed in the dark without a sound. Then I drove to the hospital alone, both hands tight on the wheel, the city empty around me, and I sat under white lights in a white room for four hours and held my own hand while a nurse with kind eyes told me gently what my body had already finished telling me.

The drive home, the sky was going grey, and I pulled into the parking space and turned off the engine and sat there and breathed until something inside me settled into a decision that was quiet and final and had no more room in it for waiting.

I went upstairs, but I did not wake him.

Then I packed one bag because the woman I was about to become did not need anything that had belonged to the woman I had been in that apartment, and I moved through those rooms in the grey morning light, touching nothing I could not walk away from, and at the front door, I stopped with my hand on the frame.

There was no note. There was nothing a note could say that the space would not say better.

I walked to the car, sat down, and dialled a number I had not called in three years.

One ring.

"Seraphina," said Cyrus, and his voice had the particular steadiness of someone who had not been sleeping.

"I'm coming home," I said.

There was two seconds of silence. "We know," he said. "We've been ready."

I pulled out of that parking space, and I drove, and I did not look in the mirror once, because the woman behind me was someone I was finished being, and the woman I was driving toward had been waiting long enough.