All Chapters of Losing to love : Chapter 21 - Chapter 30

Alexandria’s POVTwo weeks after the scan, Jamie started leaving work before seven.I noticed the first time because I was in the middle of making dinner and wasn’t expecting him and the sound of his car caught me off guard enough that I burned the onions. The second time I was ready for it. The third time I stopped counting because I didn’t want to track it like evidence. That was the old way of living in this house — cataloging everything, building cases, filing grievances in careful mental folders. I was trying not to do that anymore.It didn’t always work.The pregnancy was making itself known in new ways every few days, like it had a checklist of symptoms it was working through methodically. The nausea was tapering but the tiredness had arrived to replace it, a deep bone-level exhaustion that hit at around three in the afternoon and turned everything slightly underwater. I’d started napping, which I hadn’t done since I was a child, and I’d wake up disoriented in the guest room wit

Alexandria’s POVI wore red.Not the safe kind of red, not the deep wine shade I usually defaulted to when I wanted color without commitment. This was a real red. The kind that announced itself. Floor length, simple cut, no embellishment except for the way it fit, which was enough. I’d bought it three weeks ago on a Tuesday when I’d been in the city alone and walked past a boutique window and stopped and gone inside without talking myself out of it first.I hadn’t shown it to Jamie. Hadn’t mentioned it. It wasn’t about him.When I came downstairs he was in the foyer checking something on his phone in his tuxedo, and he looked up and the phone went still in his hand.He didn’t say anything for a moment.“You’re wearing red,” he said finally.“Yes.”He looked at me the way he’d been looking at me lately, the open version, the one that didn’t have marble over the top of it. “You look—”“Don’t,” I said, not unkindly. “Let’s just go.”He nodded. He held the door.The Bellagio was doing what

Alexandria’s POVI woke up in the main bedroom.I hadn’t planned it. The night before we’d come home from the Bellagio and I’d been tired in the good way, the way you’re tired after something that cost you real energy and gave something back, and I’d gone upstairs and turned toward the main bedroom without thinking about it and gotten into bed and fallen asleep before I’d finished deciding whether I meant to.Jamie had come in later. I was mostly asleep when I heard him. He’d been careful about it, the lights staying off, his side of the bed shifting quietly, none of the old careless weight of a man who didn’t think about whether his presence was welcome.I’d fallen back asleep almost immediately.When I woke up it was early, the room still grey, and he was already gone. His side of the bed still held the shape of him faintly in the way mattresses do. I lay there looking at the ceiling and waited for the nausea and it came, milder now, a manageable visitor rather than the ambush it use

Alexandria’s POVMy mother arrived on a Saturday morning with one carry-on bag and the particular energy of a woman who had raised a child alone and developed a radar for things that weren’t being said.I picked her up from the airport myself. No house car, no driver. I wanted the thirty minutes in the car before she saw the house, before she saw Jamie, before the visit became a real thing with all its variables. Just the two of us on the freeway with the desert on both sides and the AC running and her hand reaching over to rest on mine on the gearshift the moment she got in the car.She looked at my stomach before she looked at my face. Then she looked at my face.“You look well,” she said. Which from my mother meant something specific — not pretty, not put together, but well. Like a plant that had been in the wrong soil and had been moved.“I feel better than I did,” I said.“Better than you did when?”“Pick a point,” I said.She nodded. Settled back in the seat. Let the freeway pass

Alexandria’s POVTwenty weeks arrived the way milestones do when you’ve been both dreading and moving toward them — suddenly, after what felt like a long time of almost being there.I woke up on the morning of the scan with the particular alertness of a day that matters. Not the anxious kind, not the held-breath kind I’d been living in for most of this pregnancy. Something steadier. Like my body understood before my brain did that today was a day to be present for.Jamie was already awake when I opened my eyes.He was on his side facing away from me, not asleep, the particular stillness of someone who has been awake for a while and is being quiet about it. I’d been back in the main bedroom for three weeks now, not as a statement, just as a fact that had gradually become true. The guest room was a room again. The suitcase was a suitcase. These things had stopped needing to mean anything beyond what they were.“You’re awake,” I said.“Have been for a while.”“Nervous?”A pause. “Yes.”I