Healed by My Second Chance

Chapter 9 — Melody

I told myself the nausea was caused by stress.

Three weeks of crying myself to sleep and picking at my food would do that to anyone.

I managed to believe that for eleven days, which was either very stupid or exactly as stupid as a person became when the truth was too large to hold.

Eleven days of blaming the smell of bus fumes during my aimless walks. Of skipping breakfast because my stomach turned at the sight of eggs. Of telling myself that grief did strange things to a body and mine was simply catching up.

Priya was the one who finally said it aloud.

She showed up at my apartment three days after I stopped answering her texts. She stood in my doorway with a bag of groceries and an expression that said she wasn’t leaving until she got real answers.

She found me hunched over the kitchen sink, dry-heaving at nothing.

“Mel.”

She said my name carefully, as though one wrong word might make me shut down completely.

“When was your last period?”

I did the calculation in my head and felt the floor tilt beneath me, slow and sickening, like stepping down and finding nothing where the next step should have been.

I bought the test at a pharmacy a few blocks from my apartment, somewhere no one knew my face.

I sat on the edge of my bed for what felt like an hour, holding the test without looking at it, as though refusing to look could change the answer hidden beneath my thumb.

The bathroom light continued to buzz, the way it always did, indifferent to the fact that my entire life was about to divide into a before and an after.

Two lines.

Steady. Undeniable. Impossible to argue with, no matter how long I stared.

I laughed.

I don’t know why. Nothing about it was funny.

Maybe laughter was simply the only sound left inside me that wasn’t crying, some final reflex refusing to let the silence win.

I placed a hand over my stomach and felt nothing yet. Nothing at all. Only skin and the low hum of a decision the universe had apparently made for me without asking.

A baby.

His baby.

Someone who might have his eyes, his jaw, or that particular way he had of going still immediately before saying something that mattered.

I thought about telling him.

For about ten minutes, I allowed myself to consider it seriously while sitting there with the test still in my hand. I imagined walking into that building one more time, standing in front of him, saying the words aloud, and watching what happened to his face.

I already knew what would happen.

I had seen it in the storage room—that flat, careful expression he wore before saying something designed to end a conversation for good.

Girls like you don’t end up with men like me.

A baby wouldn’t change that calculation for him. It would only give him another reason to make sure I disappeared quietly.

For his own sake, not mine.

His own words, still burning where he had left them.

The marks hadn’t faded the way I kept hoping they would.

Two had already started to dull around the edges, their color slowly moving closer to my normal skin. But the first mark—low on my collarbone, caused by the first thing he said that actually broke something inside me—remained red and raw beneath the bathroom light.

It showed no sign of going anywhere.

I touched it and felt the same low burn I had experienced on the day it appeared, as though it remembered exactly what had put it there and wasn’t finished being angry about it.

I wasn’t going to raise a child in a city that saw me the way Kane had taught me it did.

I wasn’t going to spend the next eighteen years hoping he wouldn’t notice, wouldn’t remember, or wouldn’t decide one day that a rogue’s child born on his territory was a liability worth cleaning up.

I would rather raise my child somewhere small and forgettable than watch it grow up beneath that kind of shadow.

I had one relative left in the world.

An aunt on my mother’s side who lived three states away. She had sent exactly one letter after my mother died and hadn’t written again.

Not out of cruelty, I didn’t think. It was simply distance, the kind that grew when no one fought against it.

I still remembered the address from the envelope I had kept for ten years without understanding why. The paper had gone soft along the creases from being handled so many times.

That night, I packed everything I owned into one duffel bag.

It didn’t take long.

That was its own kind of answer—how little I had to lose by leaving.

A few shirts. A photograph of my mother that I had kept in a drawer for ten years. The shoes I had already worn through two soles.

Nothing that would slow me down.

Nothing that would give anyone a reason to follow.

I left a note for Priya, sliding it beneath her apartment door on my way to the bus station. She deserved better than discovering I was gone through silence.

It was only a few lines. Trying to fit everything she had meant to me onto a scrap of paper pushed beneath a door felt insulting somehow.

I didn’t leave anything for Kane.

He had made it clear that there was nothing left to say. For once in my life, I believed a man the first time he told me who he was.

I caught the first bus out at six the next morning, one hand pressed flat against my stomach as I watched the city that had never wanted me shrink to nothing through the window behind me.

The driver didn’t ask where I was going. He didn’t seem to care that a girl with one duffel bag and swollen eyes was leaving town before sunrise.

In the end, I was grateful for that too.

One more person who didn’t ask questions I wasn’t ready to answer.