CHAPTER 3  My Plan Crumbling 

Richard POV

I sat in my office long after Eva's words had stopped ringing in my ears, staring at nothing, replaying four years of a marriage I never asked for. My grandfather had built this arrangement out of thin air and left me to live inside it, and now here I was, thirty years old, being told I was about to be a father by a woman I had spent the entire drive to work trying to convince myself was lying.

I did not believe her. I told myself that over and over until it almost sounded true.

A baby. Now? The same week I finally ended things.

I called my lawyer before I even sat down at my desk.

"I need something arranged," I said the moment he picked up. "A paternity test. As fast as it can legally be done."

"How far along is she?"

"A few weeks. Barely anything."

He was quiet for a second. "Richard, a standard test needs a blood sample from her, and for a noninvasive prenatal test, she generally needs to be at least seven or eight weeks along before the lab can pull enough fetal DNA to run it properly. If we push before that, we risk an inconclusive result, and then we are back where we started, only slower."

"So how long?"

"If she is barely a few weeks now, we may be looking at three or four more weeks before the sample can even be drawn. After that, results typically come back in five to eight business days, faster if we pay for a rush."

"Pay for the rush," I said. "I do not care what it costs."

"I will get it scheduled the moment she is far enough along. In the meantime, I can fold the paternity clause directly into the divorce filing, so both move together and nothing gets delayed once the results come in."

"Do that."

I hung up and sat there with my hands flat on the desk, trying to steady myself. Probably more than a month before I would even know for certain, and every day of it I would have to sit across from her at breakfast, at dinner, in the hallway, wondering if the thing growing inside her belonged to me or was simply a very convenient story.

Valerie called that evening before I had even made it home and I told her the issue on ground 

"Tell me she did not actually say she is pregnant."

"She said it."

"Richard." Valerie's voice went sharp immediately. "You cannot let this happen. You know exactly what this is. She sees the divorce coming and she is trying to trap you before it is final."

"I know how it looks."

"It does not just look that way. It is that way. Think about it. Four years of nothing between you two, and suddenly, the night you end things, she has an announcement."

"I ordered a test," I said. "It will settle it either way."

"A test will not save you if she plans to fight it in court regardless of what it says. You need to deny it now, publicly, before this becomes something you cannot walk back from."

"I am not going to deny something I have not confirmed yet, Valerie."

"Why not? If it turns out to be true later, you deal with it quietly, on your own terms, with lawyers controlling every word of it. But if you sit here now saying maybe, waiting politely for a lab result, you hand her all the power. She will use this to drag out the divorce, to draw sympathy, to make you look like the villain in front of your grandfather while he is deciding what happens to everything."

"I am not calling her a liar in public before I know the truth."

"You are making a mistake."

"Maybe. It is still my mistake to make."

She went quiet on the other end for a moment, and when she spoke again her voice had cooled into something colder and more careful. "Fine. Do it your way. But do not come back to me surprised when this costs you more than you think it will."

She hung up before I could answer.

I did not sleep much over the following weeks. I went to work, I sat through meetings I barely remembered afterward, and every night I came home to a house that felt smaller with her still living in it, both of us waiting for the same appointment neither of us spoke about out loud. My lawyer called twice with updates that amounted to nothing, only that the date for the blood draw was getting closer, that everything was on track, that patience was the only thing left to do.

When the day finally came, Eva went to the clinic without telling me the details, and I did not ask. I told myself I did not want to know, though the truth was closer to the opposite. I wanted to know everything and I was terrified of what knowing would mean.

The wait after that felt longer than the weeks that came before it, though my lawyer promised me it would only be a matter of days once the sample was in the lab's hands. Five days. Maybe seven if they were backed up. I counted them the way I imagined Eva must have counted the weeks before she ever came to me at all.

I was at my desk on the sixth day, going through a stack of contracts I was not actually reading, when my phone rang. My lawyer's name lit up the screen.

"Please tell me this is the results," I said, answering before the second ring finished.

"It is."

Something in his voice made my stomach tighten before he said another word.

"The lab called me directly this morning," he said. "I have not said anything to Mrs. Brooks yet. I wanted you to hear it first, given everything."

"Just tell me."

"Richard, I need you to understand this is preliminary, and we will want a formal written report to follow, but the lab was clear on the phone."

"Tell me the result."

He paused, just long enough that I could hear my own pulse in my ears, and then he said the one word I had spent weeks bracing myself to hear and somehow still was not ready for.

"Positive." 

I opened my mouth to ask him something, anything, a question about what came next, about the paperwork, what I was supposed to do with a word that had just rearranged the entire shape of my life in a single syllable, and I got as far as drawing in the breath to speak before the rest of the sentence simply would not come.