All Chapters of Rejected and Pregnant with Alpha Twins: Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

~Selene’s POV~The firm is called Meridian Events.She finds it the same way she found Dr. Amara Osei methodically, without urgency, working through a list she has built from the city's business directory and two careful hours of cross-referencing. Meridian is mid-sized. Not the largest operation in Silvermere, which would require references she cannot provide without explanation, and not so small that it would have no infrastructure to support a contractor. Its website shows three years of consistent work — corporate functions, charity galas, a civic awards dinner last autumn. The standard of the photography is adequate. The logistics visible in the event layouts are competent but not exceptional.She calls on a Tuesday.The office manager, a woman named Bea with a brisk, unsentimental phone manner that Selene appreciates immediately, listens to her pitch without interrupting. Event coordination. Contractor basis. Available for immediate assignment."We have something this Thursday,"

~Selene’s POV~The café is called something she doesn't register until she is already inside.She had not planned to stop. The morning had been a coordination assignment — a follow-up call with Bea at Meridian about a charity luncheon scheduled for the following week, forty-seven guests this time, one more than the corporate dinner, which Bea had mentioned with the tone of someone offering a promotion. After the call, Selene had walked. She does this now, in the hours between the work and the flat, because the city is still learning her and she is still learning it, and the only way to know a place is to move through it without an agenda.The café was on the corner of a street she had not taken before. The window was fogged from the inside. She was cold, and the iron supplements Dr. Amara had prescribed made her colder than she used to be, something about circulation and absorption that she had read about and accepted as a fact to be managed.She went in.The table she takes is small,

~Vivienne’s POV~ Th ~Selene’s POV~ The appointment is at ten. She knows this without checking the card Dr. Amara gave her at the last visit, knows it the way she has come to know the shape of her Silvermere mornings — the bakery's shutters at seven, the grey-dog man at half past, the particular quality of the east light when it clears the building opposite and falls in a clean line across the bedroom floor. She dresses without the mirror. Dark trousers, the grey blouse, the coat that says what it needs to say. The velvet box stays on the nightstand. She has begun to leave it there with something approaching intention — not distance, but the deliberate choice of a woman who understands that what it holds does not require constant carrying. She has started to believe they are real in a way that does not depend on proof. The clinic on the northern quarter street is the same as it always is: the plain door, the unembellished nameplate, the waiting room that smells of nothing and carr

~Selene’s POV~She notices him on the third morning.The first morning she had attributed him to coincidence — a large man standing near the building entrance, still in the particular way of someone with nowhere immediate to be. The second morning she had filed him as a resident, someone whose schedule happened to align with hers, the ordinary overlap of a shared building and a shared hour. By the third morning she has enough data points to know what she is looking at, and what she is looking at is not coincidence or schedule.He is positioned at the corner of the building's external wall, two metres from the entrance, with a clear sightline to the street in both directions. He is not leaning. He is not looking at his phone. He is standing with the grounded, weight-distributed stillness of someone trained to be in exactly that position for as long as it requires.She knows this posture. She has seen it at Pack Hall. She has seen it at territory borders.She goes back inside and makes

~Selene’s POV~The third assignment ends at half past two on a Tuesday.Bea from Meridian Events sends the confirmation through before Selene has finished packing her notes — the event ran smoothly, the client is pleased, and there is, Bea writes, a question she would like to discuss at Selene's earliest convenience regarding availability for something larger in the new year. Selene reads the message standing at the entrance to the Meridian Street offices with her bag over one shoulder and the thin autumn sun doing its best above the roofline across the road.She writes back: Available. Call when you're ready.She presses send and puts her phone in her pocket.She walks to the café on the corner because Petra is already there, because Petra is constitutionally incapable of being anywhere other than already there, which is something Selene has come to understand is simply how Petra moves through the world, preceding things, occupying her corner of them before arrival can become an even