She stopped.
“How?”
“My attorney.”
Evelyn looked away toward the traffic, and when she spoke again her voice was thin with exhaustion. “Then you know why I didn’t tell you.”
“I know you were trying to protect the baby.”
“And you,” she said.
He almost laughed at the absurdity of it. “You don’t protect me by disappearing.”
“You don’t protect me by staying.”
A long pause followed. Then, perhaps because she was too tired to carry the whole world alone for one more hour, she reached for his hand and placed it carefully against the curve of her stomach.
Movement met his palm.
It was small, or maybe he imagined it because he wanted so badly for the child to become undeniable in flesh instead of theory. But something passed between them in that second that no divorce judge could dissolve. Awe emptied him out. He had faced gunfire with steadier breath than the one that left him then.
“You can come to the next appointment,” she said. “Only you. No entourage. No chaos.”
Emotion thickened his voice. “I’ll be there.”
At the clinic two days later, he sat in a waiting room full of soft music and anxious hope, looking wildly out of place in his plain dark jacket and restrained silence. When Evelyn walked in, wearing a gray dress that curved gently over her pregnancy, his chest hurt with the force of wanting a life that looked almost normal.
During the ultrasound, the room filled with the rapid heartbeat of his son.
The sound broke something open in him. Evelyn cried without trying not to. Dominic stood near her shoulder, gripping the back of a chair hard enough to whiten his knuckles, and knew with perfect clarity that he had wasted too much time being proud.
Afterward she let him take her to a diner. They ate pancakes at noon, and for half an hour they talked about trivial things. Burned water. A bookstore near her apartment. The absurd tyranny of pregnancy cravings. The ease between them returned in fragments, fragile and startling, like sunlight through cracked blinds.
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