Married To The Wrong Castellan.

Chapter 5

Delilah POV

“You didn’t know?” The doctor’s eyebrows lifted, just slightly. “You’re pregnant, Ms. Hartwell.”

“Preg what?” The word came out of me broken in half. “How— that’s not— I don’t understand.”

“The blood work confirmed it based on your hormone levels.” She said it gently, like she already knew the ground was about to shift under me.

“I’m sorry. I assumed…” She stopped herself, choosing her words carefully. “With the symptoms and how long they’d been going on, I thought you might have already suspected. I didn’t mean to drop this on you without warning.”

“The symptoms.” I hadn’t even allowed myself to call them that.

The exhaustion that sleep never seemed to fix. The mornings when the sight or smell of food made my stomach twist. Three, maybe four times, the room had tilted beneath me, forcing me to grab the nearest counter until it passed.

I had blamed it on stress. What else could it be after the last three months?

I had never let myself consider that my body might be trying to tell me something else.

How far along?” My voice came out thinner than I meant it to.

“We’ll need to confirm that with an ultrasound scan,” the doctor said. “I’d rather not guess when we can just look.”

“Now?” I asked. “Can we do it now?”

“I can have someone in within the hour.”

The hour felt like a year.

Richard sat in the chair against the wall, elbows on his knees, quiet for a long stretch. Then, without looking up, he said,

“Whatever this turns out to be, you’re not doing it alone. I need you to know that.”

“You don’t know what it’s going to be yet,” I said.

“Doesn’t matter.” He finally looked at me.“I meant what I said in the car three months ago. I’m not going anywhere.”

Something about the way he said it stayed with me. Not the words themselves, but the certainty behind them. Like he already knew what the scan would say. Like he’d made peace with an answer we hadn’t even gotten yet.

“You’re very calm about this,” I said.

“Would you rather I panic?”

“I don’t know what I’d rather.” I pulled the thin hospital blanket tighter around myself. “I just keep waiting for you to ask the obvious question.”

He didn’t answer right away. He looked at his hands instead, turning them over like he was checking for something he’d misplaced.

“I don’t need to ask,” he said finally. “Whatever the answer is, it doesn’t change what I already told you.”

I looked away first, pressing my shaking hands flat against my knees.

The tech knocked once and let herself in, wheeling a small machine beside the bed. “Ms. Hartwell? I hear we’re doing a dating scan today.”

“Yes.” My voice barely made it out.

“This might be a little cold.” She squeezed a clear gel onto my stomach, and I flinched at the temperature of it. The wand pressed down, moved, pressed again. A quiet static hum filled the room.

I stared at the ceiling and let my mind go somewhere it hadn’t gone in three months.

Wyatt’s hands on my waist that last night, careful like I was something he didn’t want to break. His voice in my hair, telling me this was the last night either of us would spend as anyone but each other's. I’d believed him completely.

For one wild, reckless second, hope pushed through everything else. If this was his, some part of this nightmare might still make sense.

“All done.” The tech wiped the gel off with a cloth and started packing up the machine. “I’ll have the full results sent to Dr. Bennett. She’ll go over everything with you.”

She left. The room felt too quiet without the hum of the machine in it.

A minute later, the door opened again, and it was the doctor this time, a folder tucked under her arm.

“Mr. Castellan,” she said, glancing at Richard, “would you mind stepping out for a moment? I’d like to go over the results with Ms. Hartwell privately first, just as a matter of routine.”

Richard looked at me. I nodded, even though something in my chest was already bracing for whatever came next.

He stood, squeezed my hand once before he let go, and left without a word.

The doctor pulled the stool closer and opened the folder on her lap.

I sat there with my hands pressed flat against my knees, waiting, and my mind went somewhere I’d been avoiding for three months straight.

Two nights. That was all it came down to. Two nights, three months ago, one right after the other, and I’d spent every day since trying not to think about either of them.

I could still remember Wyatt’s arms around me, the warmth of his body, the certainty we both carried that by this time tomorrow, we would finally be married. We had believed we were hours away from the life we had spent years waiting for.

I remembered every second because I had replayed that night so many times since.

Sometimes, I searched those memories for a warning. A hesitation. A look on his face that should have told me what he was going to do the next morning.

I never found one.

The second night was different.

I barely remembered it at all.

The night after my wedding had fallen apart. The humiliation. The whispers. The bar. The drinks I should never have touched. I remembered asking Richard to take me back to his house instead of mine. After that, almost nothing. A door closing. His face too close to mine. Then nothing solid until I woke up beside him the next morning, my dress on his floor, no real memory of what had actually happened between us in the hours in between.

For three months, I had refused to think too hard about it.

What had I done?

What had Richard done?

Had either of us truly wanted it, or had we both been too broken that night to understand what we were doing?

I had buried those questions beneath everything else that had happened. I had told myself it was one more thing I could survive if I never looked at it too closely.

Now, sitting in that doctor’s office, waiting for a number that suddenly felt capable of changing everything, I realized I had been lying to myself. It had mattered the entire time.

“Based on the measurements, you’re right around twelve weeks,” the doctor said, turning the folder slightly so I could see it if I wanted to.

“Twelve weeks.”

My mind circled back as I began to do the math in my head. Twelve weeks, that puts it right after the wedding. Past the night with Wyatt entirely. Landing somewhere in that blur of a morning I could barely account for.

The Doctor’s voice kept going, something about follow-up appointments, but it sounded far away, muffled, like I was hearing it from underwater.

“Fuck.” It’s Richard’s.

“Can we keep the details private for—”

The door opened. Richard stepped back in before I could finish, already halfway into the room.

“Of course,” the doctor said smoothly, not missing a beat, closing the folder like it had never been open at all. “That’s completely your right. We can go over the rest whenever you’re ready.”

If Richard noticed anything odd in the exchange, he didn’t show it.

“Well?” He crossed the room in a few steps, stopping at the edge of the bed. “What did she say?”

“Everything’s fine.” My voice sounded flatter than I intended. “She just wants to run a few more tests before we’re done.”

“That’s it?” He leaned closer, his eyes fixed on mine. There was something almost eager in them now, something I hadn’t seen before. “She didn’t tell you anything else?”

Not really.”

He didn’t press further, but I caught it anyway. A flicker crossed his face, quick enough that I might have missed it if I hadn’t been watching him so closely.

“You seem happy,” I said carefully.

“I am happy,” he said it easily, like the question surprised him. “You passed out in the street this morning. Finding out you’re alright is a good thing, Delilah.”

It should have sounded like enough. It didn’t.

Richard’s hand found mine, warm and steady, exactly the way it always was.

Whatever that flicker in his eyes had been, it wasn’t relief.