All Chapters of Pregnant For The Wrong Brother: Chapter 41 - Chapter 50

50 Chapters

Chapter 41: Two Pink Lines

Ana's POV After a long time, I got it open. I read the instructions three times even though a child could follow them, because reading them was a way of not doing the thing yet.Then there was nothing left to read.I took the test. I set it flat on the edge of the sink. And I stepped back and gripped the towel rail and stared at it like it might move."Three minutes," I whispered. "It's three minutes. You've survived worse than three minutes."They were the longest three minutes of my life.I didn't look at my phone. I looked at that small white stick and I counted my own heartbeats, and I thought about a doctor's voice saying ‘ruptured, not ever,’ and I thought about my husband letting go of my hand, and I thought about Nicole's mouth curving as she said ‘you're barren, Ana.’Just then the first line appeared. The control line. It always appears. It means nothing. I knew that and my heart still slammed against my ribs.I made myself look away. I counted to sixty, slow, my whole bo

Chapter 42: Dear Little One

Ana's POV ‘Dear Little One,I don't know how to start this. I've written a thousand marketing decks and I can't write four words to you.Here is the truth. You are not supposed to exist. A doctor told me two years ago that my body was broken, that there would never be a you. I believed him. I built my whole sad life on believing him.And here you are anyway. You didn't listen. I already love that about you.I don't know how to keep you safe yet. But I'm going to learn. I promise you that. Whatever it costs.Love, your mom.’I closed the notebook and held it against my chest and cried, quiet, so I wouldn't wake him.°°°°°°°°°°The sickness got harder to hide.So I learned to time it. I'd wake before him, slip to the far bathroom, be sick as quietly as I could, then brush my teeth and put my face back on and climb into bed like I'd only gone for water.I got good at it.But Emily has known me since we were nineteen, and Emily doesn't miss things.She showed up at a lunch I couldn't ca

Chapter 43: The Wrong Report

Caspian's POV "Run the test again," I said.The doctor's voice came back tired and patient down the line. "Mr. Strauss, we ran it twice this year already. The results are unchanged. They have been unchanged for six years. Running it a third time will tell us exactly what the first two told us.""Then tell me anyway.""The count is effectively zero. The motility is negligible. I'm sorry to keep saying it plainly, but you keep asking me to." A pause. "The likelihood of you fathering a child by natural means is, for all practical purposes, none. That hasn't moved. It is not going to move."I sat in the dark of my study and didn't fall apart.I've had six years to fall apart. I did all of it in the first year, alone, the way I do everything. So there's nothing left in me that flinches at the word."You've said that before," I said."I have. And every year you call me back and ask me to run it again, and every year I do, because you pay me to." His voice softened, which I didn't want. "Ca

Chapter 44: Saving Strauss

Ana's POV I buried myself in work, because thinking about the baby hurt.It hurt in the good way and the bad way at once. So when the floor exploded into chaos at nine in the morning, I let it swallow me whole and was grateful for it."The Hendricks acquisition is dead," Doyle said, storming past my desk. "Dead. Their board just called an emergency session. We lose this, we lose the whole northern expansion."I was on my feet before I made up my mind to be.The war room was already loud when I got there.Six executives talking over each other, a wall of numbers on the screen that made no sense stacked the way they'd stacked them, and Caspian at the head of the table, jaw tight, listening to five different men tell him five different reasons the deal had collapsed overnight."Their legal team found a liability clause," one man was saying. "Buried in our own paperwork. They're using it to walk.""Then we renegotiate the clause.""There's no time, sir, their board votes in four hours…"

Chapter 45: Almost

Ana's POV He wouldn't let me take a cab."I'm fine," I said. "It was a dizzy spell. You have a company to run.""The company survived one afternoon without me before." He guided me into the car, his hand at the small of my back. "It can survive this one too."The drive home was quiet.Not the tense quiet of the fight weeks ago. A different quiet. His hand found mine over the console and stayed there the whole way, his thumb tracing slow circles over my knuckles, and in that moment I thought, “tonight. I tell him tonight. No more hiding.”°°°°°°°°°°He cooked, badly, on purpose, because he knew it made me laugh."You're doing the eggs again," I said, leaning in the kitchen doorway. "After the last time.""I've improved.""You've made more smoke.""That's just enthusiasm." He caught me around the waist when I came close enough, pulled me against him, flour somehow on his hands though there was no flour in eggs. "Dance with me.""There's no music.""There doesn't need to be." He took

Chapter 46: The Heartbeat

Ana's POV The tiny heartbeat filled the quiet examination room, steady and impossibly alive. For weeks, I had been terrified of seeing those two pink lines. But now, as I listened to the rhythm of the little life growing inside me, fear and happiness overwhelmed me so violently that I couldn't tell which one hurt more."There," the doctor said, turning the monitor towards me. "Strong heartbeat. Right where it should be."I couldn't say a word. I just stared at the small flickering shape on the screen and cried, openly, no dignity left to hold onto."The baby looks healthy," the doctor continued, wiping the gel from my stomach. "But you're still early. I want to be honest with you, Miss Voss. This is a delicate stage. Stress, exhaustion, emotional strain, all of it raises your risk. I'd like you to protect yourself from as much of that as you can."I almost laughed. Protect myself from stress? My whole life for the past two months had been built out of it."I'll try," I said instead.

Chapter 47: The Secret He Was Never Meant To See

Caspian's POV The picture slid out from under the papers into my hand.Gray. Blurred. A small curved shape at the center, circled in white by someone's neat pen.I didn't understand it at first. My mind just refused to understand it, the way you refuse to understand a number that's too large to be real. But then it landed, all at once, the whole weight of it dropping through me like a stone through water.‘A child? She's pregnant?’At that moment I sat down on the edge of the bed because my legs didn't feel entirely mine anymore.I don't remember wanting to feel anything. Feeling has never come first for me. But it came first now, quickly and heavy, before I could get a wall up in front of it.‘A child? Mine?’I thought of a locked study door and a voice on the other end of a phone line telling me, again, patiently, the way you explain a truth to a man who refuses to learn it. “None. That hasn't moved. It isn't going to move.”Six years of none.And here, in my hand, was a picture

Chapter 48: The First Lie

Sebastian's POV Nicole had become too… odd.For weeks, every answer she gave sounded rehearsed, every smile too perfect, every explanation polished before it ever reached me. I used to think love made people easier to understand. But now I was starting to realize that love was the easiest place to hide a lie.So I threw myself into work because work made sense. Numbers held still. Contracts said what they said. My own house had stopped being a place I understood, so I stopped trying to understand it and buried myself in things I could still control.The investigator's report came in on a Tuesday."Read it slowly," he told me on the phone. "There's a lot in there that looks like nothing until you look twice."The dates were wrong. Not by a little.Nicole had told me the pregnancy was confirmed in one week. The clinic's own intake log showed a different week entirely, ten days off, enough to matter, enough to change everything if I ran the math the way I'd been running it for weeks.

Chapter 49: Tomorrow

Ana's POV Tomorrow.It had become the most dangerous word in my vocabulary.Tomorrow, I would tell Caspian about the baby.Tomorrow, I would stop hiding.Tomorrow, we would finally start the future I had been too afraid to believe in.But I didn't know that tomorrow was already slipping through my fingers.°°°°°°°°°°I woke up lighter than I had in weeks.Caspian was still asleep beside me, one arm thrown over the pillow, his face unguarded in a way it never was awake. Laying there and staring at him breathe, I made myself a promise.‘Tonight. No more tomorrow. Tonight he knows.’°°°°°°°°°°He was really kind to me that morning, kinder than usual."Sit," he said, steering me towards a chair before I'd even reached the coffee. "I've got it.""You don't have to.""I want to." He set a plate in front of me, eggs actually cooked properly for once. "How do you feel? Any dizziness?""I'm fine, Caspian.""You'd tell me if you weren't?""I would." Soon I'll tell you everything. "You're bein

Chapter 50: The Man Who Should Have Stayed Buried

Caspian's POV Some phone calls change your day.Others change your life.And the moment my phone came on, I knew this wasn't another business crisis. Looking at Anastasia standing in front of me with hope shining in her eyes, I wanted nothing more than to ignore it. "Give me one minute," I said. "I'm sorry. One minute, that's all.""Caspian…""One minute." I was already moving towards the balcony, the glass door sliding shut behind me.I answered before it could ring twice. "Talk.""He surfaced," the voice said. "The man from the old file. Showed up somewhere he shouldn't have, then vanished again before we could get eyes on him properly.""Where?""We're working on it. And there's something else." There was a small pause I didn't like. "Someone's been asking questions. About records from years back. We don't know who yet, or what exactly they're looking for.""Find out.""We're trying, sir. It isn't clean. Whoever it is knows how to stay quiet."I stood there with the wind pulling

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