All Chapters of PREGNANT WITH THE CEO'S TWINS: Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

The box sits on the bathroom counter for a long time before I touch it. I've read the instructions twice already, though there isn't much to read. Pee on the stick. Wait three minutes. Two lines means one thing. One line means another. Simple. Except nothing about this feels simple. I sit on the edge of the bathtub with the test wrapped in a square of toilet paper, waiting, my knee bouncing without my permission. The bathroom light hums faintly overhead, too white, too honest. I can hear my own heartbeat in my ears. I set my phone on the sink and start the timer. Three minutes. One hundred and eighty seconds to find out whether the last two weeks of exhaustion and pain and unexplained tears have a name. I press my palm flat against my stomach, the way I did this morning at the kitchen table, except this time it isn't pain I'm bracing for. "Please," I whisper, though I don't even know what I'm asking for. Please let it be nothing. Please let it be something. I don't know wtttttf

"You can do this," I whisper to the empty kitchen. "Women do this every day. Alone. You're not the first." It doesn't make the fear smaller. It just gives it somewhere to sit while I go back to bed. Two heartbeats. Two small, stubborn heartbeats, already fighting for a life I don't know how to give them. I press both hands flat against my stomach now, side by side, and try to imagine what they'll look like. Whose eyes they'll have. Whether they'll be loud or quiet, whether they'll fight with each other the way siblings do, whether they'll ever ask me questions about their father that I won't know how to answer honestly. Their father. I haven't let myself think his name in weeks. I've gotten good at catching the thought before it fully forms, redirecting it the way you'd steer around a pothole in the road without really looking at it. But tonight, lying awake with nothing but silence and two flickering shapes on a printout hidden in my planner, I don't have the strength to steer ar

a way that tells me this is not a delivery driver or a lost client. "Who?" She doesn't answer. She just tilts her head toward the front of the office, and I don't need her to say the name out loud, because I already know. I feel it the way you feel a change in weather before the first drop of rain falls. I stand slowly, smoothing my blouse down over a stomach that still looks the same as it always has, though it doesn't feel that way anymore. I press my palm flat against it for one steadying second before I make myself walk toward the front of the office. He's standing near the reception desk, hands in his pockets, looking entirely out of place among our cluttered desks and half-dead office plants. He looks like he belongs somewhere with marble floors and floor-to-ceiling windows, not here, under fluorescent lights that hum too loudly. "Andriy." His name comes out steadier than I feel saying it. "This is a surprise." "Is it?" His eyes hold mine, unreadable, the same way they were

BRABRA "Talk to me," he says, crouching slightly to stay at my eye level, one arm firm around my back. "What hurts? Is it your stomach?" I can't answer right away. I focus on breathing, in through the nose, out through the mouth, my mother's old trick failing me completely for the first time in weeks. "Brabra." His voice sharpens with something close to fear now. "Look at me. What's wrong?" The pain finally starts to ease, slow and reluctant, leaving me shaking in the circle of his arm. I become aware, all at once, of exactly how close we're standing, his hand splayed protectively against my back, my palm still pressed to my stomach, still trapped beneath his worried gaze. He looks down. At my hand. At the exact spot where it rests. Something shifts behind his eyes — understanding arriving in slow, careful pieces, the way a picture comes into focus when you finally step back far enough to see the whole of it. "Brabra," he says again, quieter this time, almost unsteady

ANDRIY Except for one line near the bottom. A short medical leave request, filed and later withdrawn, dated almost exactly two months after the night I left a hotel room before sunrise and told myself it didn't need to mean anything. I stare at the date longer than I should. I do the math again, the same calculation I've run a dozen times since that meeting room, and this time it lands somewhere I can't talk myself out of anymore. Two months. Long enough for a woman to find out. Long enough for fear to set in, and silence, and every careful, practiced lie I've watched her tell me since the day I walked back into her life. "Sir?" My assistant is still standing there, waiting for some kind of response I haven't given him. "Is something wrong with the file?" "No." I close the folder, my voice steadier than I feel. "That's all for now." He leaves. I sit alone with the closed folder in front of me, my hand resting flat against it the way hers rests against her stomach, an un