PREGNANT WITH THE ALPHA'S UNWANTED HEIR のすべてのチャプター: チャプター 51 - チャプター 60

"Read it back to me," Bastien says.It is past midnight. The library lamp is the only light. I have been writing for three hours and he has been in the chair across from me for all of them, not reading, not on his phone, just present in the way I asked for and he provided without requiring acknowledgement.I pick up the pages.My name is Lena Crest and I am going to tell you what actually happened, starting with a staircase and a signed piece of paper and a morning I have been describing to myself in the wrong order ever since.I read the whole thing. Six pages. My voice stays even the entire way through, which surprises me slightly, because the content does not always deserve an even voice. The staircase. The lobby chair. The pregnancy test in my coat pocket. The rejection papers. The drive home I had been rehearsing in the car mirror for four words that never got said.The pages about Bastien are the hardest. Not because they are unfair. Because they are exact. The mistake he made,

The appeal panel is seated, Holt says.She calls on a Wednesday morning two weeks after the library, which puts us at eighteen weeks pregnant and five days from the tribunal and four days from the statutory review committee's first formal session.Three members, she says. The conflict exclusion was held. One of Vane's associates is out. The remaining panel is two neutrals and one associate. She pauses. For the appeal to succeed all three must agree. The two neutrals have reviewed Suki's documentation. One of them requested a secondary copy of the tracking map specifically.They read it carefully, I say.They read it very carefully, Holt says. The appeal hearing is scheduled for next week. After the tribunal.I look at the calendar on the library desk, which I have been keeping manually in the way my mother's letter said Sera kept things, in writing, on paper, because paper cannot be deleted or modified without leaving evidence.Tribunal in five days. Statutory review first session in

"He is very good at believing in himself," I say.The room is still. The arbitrator who asked the question is watching me with the specific attention of someone who has decided they want to hear what comes next and has set everything else aside for it.I do not look at my father.I have decided I will not look at him during this. Not out of anger. Out of clarity. He spent twenty-three years defining what I was allowed to see and say and feel in rooms where he was present. This room is not one of those rooms.Every document you have reviewed today is accurate, I say. The blood test when I was nine. The suppression at ten. The contract at twenty. The nursery. The joint filing. The syringe. I keep my voice level. All of it is real and all of it is documented and none of it shows you the part that the documents cannot capture.Curator Isel is writing.The documents show decisions, I say. They don't show the space between the decisions, which is where I lived. I look at the three arbitrato

"He signed a six-month lease," Bastien says.He is looking at Dara's message on my phone and his voice is doing the careful flat thing that means he has already identified what this is and is buying himself three seconds to decide how to say it.He's not going home, I say.No, Bastien says. He has nothing to go home to. The compound is under interim pack council administration. His files are in evidence. His access to Crest Pack resources is suspended. He sets my phone down on the desk. He went to the one person who is not bound by the tribunal finding and who he still has a prior relationship with.The agreement I made with Wolfe, I say.Covers Wolfe's conduct, Bastien says. It covers his commitment to stand down from any claim on you or the baby. It does not cover who he chooses to have as a neighbor. He pauses. Your father is not bound by Wolfe's agreement. He is only bound by the tribunal suspension.I look at the message.Neutral territory on the border of Ashen Pack land. A six-

It's a girl, Nadia says.She says it the same way she says everything, plainly and without ceremony, but the particular quality of her stillness after she says it tells me she has been holding that information for the last thirty seconds while she made sure the reading was clear.I'm on the examination table. Twenty weeks today. The scan is running on the portable equipment she brought up to the ninth floor because I have not left the building in four days and she stopped suggesting that I should.I look at the screen.She is small and curled and entirely certain of herself in the way that people are before they know the world has opinions about them. Her heartbeat on the monitor is steady and fast, a sound I have been learning the specific rhythm of for eight weeks.A girl.I have known this was possible. I knew this was fifty percent likely. And yet the word sits in me now like something that arrived and rearranged the furniture while I was standing in the doorway.Everything looks