The Baby Clause
“I have. And the baby likes raspberries.”
There.
The word.
Baby.
It shifted the air like a dropped glass. Not enough to break anything, but enough to make everything feel delicate.
Her eyes flicked to my stomach, narrowing ever so slightly. Doing the math. Calculating the odds. Measuring how much space I might take in her perfectly arranged world.
“3 months?” she asked, voice so mild it could slice through stone.
“Roughly.”
A long pause.
Then, finally, a single, unimpressed: “Hm.”