Lahat ng Kabanata ng Pregnant By My Ex's Brother : Kabanata 71 - Kabanata 80

I should not have gone back for the cardigan.That was the whole mistake, really. The clean decision was to stay home, keep the distance I had asked for, and stop collecting evidence of my own replacement. Instead I sat on the couch staring at Jess’s photo until the lobby light on Damien’s face became a private punishment, then got up, got dressed, and went back to the building like a woman returning to the scene of a bruise.The cardigan was still on the back of my chair. I told myself that was why. Practical. Ordinary. A sweater. Not the fact that some stupid part of me needed to see whether the photo had been a one-off or the beginning of a new visual language the office would learn fast.The executive floor was thinner when I arrived, that late-work hush of people who stayed because ambition outlasted dinner plans. A couple of analysts glanced up and then away, already less interested in me than they had been a week ago. That should have been a relief. It felt like erasure.My car

That pause ruined everything.It wasn’t long. It wasn’t a confession. It was just the absence of an immediate no, and my body treated it like proof. Damien stood on the plaza steps with the city moving behind him and Victoria’s perfume still ghosting the air, and for once he did not have the perfect line ready. In a man like him, hesitation was never empty. It was information.“How many?” I asked again.“Elena.”“How many late nights, Damien?”He dragged a hand down his face, then dropped it like the gesture had offended him. “You don’t get to invent a history from one sentence.”“I didn’t invent same place as last time. She said it. She said it like I was the interruption.”“She is a business partner.”“And I am what?” The question came out rawer than I intended. “The distance you were instructed to keep? The mess you visit when the building goes dark?”His eyes flashed. “Careful.”“Or what? You’ll put me in a car too? Different curb? Different order of priority?”“You asked for this

I came in with the decision already made, which should have made the day cleaner and instead made every hour feel like a countdown I couldn’t stop hearing.I was going to tell him.Not in a text. Not after another public humiliation. Not after another night of lying on my couch with my hand on my stomach and Marcus’s voice still under my skin and Victoria Hale’s silhouette glued to the inside of my eyelids. I was going to stay late, wait until the floor emptied, walk into his office like a person instead of a rumor, and say the sentence that had been living in me like a second pulse.I’m pregnant.Once I admitted it to myself as a plan, the building changed shape. Every glance at his glass office became heavier. Every time Victoria crossed the floor in that calm, expensive way of hers, the decision flinched and then hardened again. I had asked for distance. I had gotten it. Distance had not saved me. It had only given the rest of the world room to decide what Damien and I were without

The second the elevator doors shut on him, guilt hit so hard I bent forward over his desk.I had thrown water on a woman in his office. I had made a scene. I had asked for distance and then lost my mind the moment someone else stepped into it wearing a dress and certainty. And underneath all of that, worse than all of that, sat the thing I still hadn’t said.I came here to tell him.Instead I gave him every reason to walk out.My eyes burned. I pressed the heel of my hand against them and dragged in a breath that shook on the way down. Then I ran.The executive floor felt endless in the wrong direction; glass, corridors, a turn I took too fast, a bank of elevators already closed. I hit the call button hard enough to hurt my finger and stood there whispering his name under my breath like an idiot, like the building might take pity and bring him back up. When the next car came I took it alone, stomach rising with the drop, hands clenched so tight my nails cut half-moons into my palms.

Marcus didn’t speak for several blocks.That should have been a relief. Instead the quiet made every turn feel intentional, like he was rearranging the night around whatever he’d seen when my hand went to my stomach. I kept my face toward the window and tried to breathe like a person who had not just collapsed in public after failing to tell Damien Voss he had gotten her pregnant.Marcus’s jacket was still around my shoulders. I hated how much I needed the weight of it.“You’re quiet,” he said finally.“I’m exhausted.”“You’re something.” He changed lanes. “If you’re going to throw up, warn me. This is a new interior.”“You’re disgusting.”“I’m practical.” A beat. “You’ve gone green twice since we left the plaza.”I didn’t answer. The city lights smeared across the glass. Somewhere in that same city Damien was with Victoria in a dress built to be remembered, and the thought made my throat close so hard I had to swallow against it. Missing him had become physical. It sat under the ribs