Then her phone buzzed again.
He still kisses like he owns you.
Evelyn went white.
Dominic did not explode. He grew terrifyingly still. Somewhere outside that bakery window, Harper or someone working for her had been watching.
“Finish your tea,” he said.
She stared at him. “What?”
“Do not give her panic. She wants fear. Don’t hand it to her.”
That calm, more than anger, steadied her. He drove her home in a nondescript SUV, not the black sedan she associated with his power. In the car she finally whispered what had been living under all her resistance.
“I’m afraid if I let you back in, Harper drags the old you back with her.”
He looked at the road. “Then hold me to the new one.”
At her apartment, she did something he had not expected. She asked him upstairs.
The place was simple and warm. A throw blanket, books on the coffee table, a sickly plant by the window. Proof of a life she had built without him. He knelt in front of her on the couch, asked permission before touching her stomach, and when she brushed her fingers through his hair, the gesture nearly undid him.
“Just hold me,” she whispered. “No plans. No fixing. Just hold me.”
So he did.
They found their way back to each other slowly that night, not through spectacle, but through tenderness and truth. The intimacy was careful, reverent, full of all the things their marriage had once promised before fear began editing their lives. Lying together afterward, he almost believed peace had finally chosen them.
Then the phone buzzed again.
This time it was an email with an attachment and a subject line that read: For the baby.
Evelyn’s face went slack with terror.
“Don’t open it,” he said.
Another buzz followed. Then another.
She reached for the phone anyway, but before either of them could decide what to do, pain hit low in her abdomen. She gasped and doubled over.
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