Chapter Two
1155 Words
Chapter Two
(Nia's POV)
I don't remember the drive home.
One minute I was in that white hospital room with two heartbeats hidden in my bag. The next I was standing in the front hall of the Blackwood house, my coat still on, listening to the silence of a home that had never once felt like mine.
I should have been happy. Some small part of me was. But happiness in this house had always had a short life.
Because I kept hearing Adrian's voice.
We had been at a dinner party, months ago. Someone at the table passed around photos of their newborn, and the whole room went soft and warm. I had smiled. I had let myself imagine, just for a second.
Then Adrian leaned in, low enough that only I could hear.
"Don't get any ideas," he said. "I don't want children. And not with…"
He hadn't even looked at me when he said it. But I understood his unspoken words.
‘And not with me.’
Now I had two of them growing inside me.
How was I supposed to tell a man who didn't want children that he was about to have a pair? How was I supposed to tell him anything at all, when he could barely stand to be in the same room as me?
But he had a right to know. He was their father, whether either of us had planned it or not.
So, I decided I would wait up for him. I would find the right words and say them calmly, the way I delivered news the board didn't want to hear.
I made tea I didn't drink. I sat on the long sofa in the living room and rehearsed the sentence in my head until it stopped sounding like real words.
'Adrian, I'm pregnant. We're having twins.'
The clock ticked past ten. Then eleven. He still wasn't home.
Somewhere past midnight, the waiting turned into sleep.
When I opened my eyes, I was no longer on the sofa.
I was in our bed, in the dark, and Adrian was there.
He had carried me up at some point. And now his hand was at my waist, his mouth at the curve of my throat, his weight settling over me with a slow, unhurried certainty.
For one treacherous second, my body answered before my mind caught up. I had loved this man since before he ever bothered to look at me. That was the humiliating truth I had never said out loud to anyone.
Then his hand slid lower. Toward my stomach. Toward them.
And panic cleared my head like ice water.
"Wait." I turned my face away. "I can't. I'm sorry. I don't feel well."
He went still above me.
Then, slowly, he drew back. His hand came up and brushed my cheek, his thumb tracing the line of it, and when he spoke his voice had softened into something I almost never heard from him.
"You've been pale all week." A small crease formed between his brows. Worry, real and unguarded. "You're not yourself, Nia. You should see a doctor."
For one breath, the cold husband was gone, and someone gentler looked down at me.
Then he caught himself. The distance folded back over his face like a door easing shut, and his hand fell from my cheek.
The irony almost made me laugh.
I've seen one, I wanted to say. I have a photograph of your children in my bag. There are two of them. They have heartbeats. I felt joy before I felt fear, and I would like, just once, for you to feel it with me.
I sat up in the dark. My heart was pounding.
This was it. This was the moment.
"Adrian," I said. "There's something I need to tell you."
His phone lit up the whole room blue.
He answered before it could ring a second time. The way he never answered anyone but her.
I watched it happen in real time. The way he sat up straight. The way his whole body changed. The way his voice, dropped into something soft and urgent that I had heard exactly twice in a year. Both times on this same call.
"Sienna. Slow down. What happened?"
I lay frozen in the dark and listened to my husband speak to another woman in a voice he had never once used on me.
"A car accident? Where are you? Are you hurt?" A pause. "Don't move. Don't do anything. I'm coming. I'm coming right now."
He was already out of bed. Already pulling on his shirt. Already gone, in every way that mattered, before his feet even touched the floor.
"Sienna's been in an accident," he said. The warmth from a moment ago had vanished without a trace. His voice was flat again, his face closed, already somewhere else. "I have to go."
"Is she badly hurt?"
"I don't know yet." He didn't look at me as he pulled on his jacket. At the door he paused, and for half a heartbeat I let myself believe he might remember that I had started to tell him something. But all he said, cold and clipped, was, "See a doctor tomorrow."
Then he was gone.
The house silent.
I sat alone in the dark. The bitterness climbed my throat until I thought I might choke on it.
A car accident. At midnight. The same week I found out I was carrying his children.
I didn't believe it for a single second. I knew Sienna. I knew the exact shape of her lies. But it didn't matter whether I believed her, because Adrian did, and Adrian would always run to her.
My hand drifted to my stomach without my permission.
I got up. I crossed to where I'd left my bag, and I drew the little black and white photo out from its hiding place in the lining.
The two tiny souls growing in me.
I looked at them for a long time.
And somewhere in that long, silent look, the woman who had spent a year waiting to be loved quietly died.
I was done waiting. Done hoping he might one day turn toward me instead of her. Done offering my heart to a man who set it down without looking, every single time.
I would not tell him. Not now. Not while Sienna still lived inside his blindness, where she could reach anything, I had loved him and he had broken my heart before he even understood it was breaking.
I would keep this secret for as long as it took. And when the time finally came, I would protect these two with everything I had. And far more than anyone in this house had ever bothered to protect me.
I pressed the photo to my chest.
"It's just us now," I whispered to them. "I'll keep you safe. I promise my babies."
- Writer
