BOUND BY ONE NIGHT

Chapter25

LAVENDER’S POV

The first night in the hospital stretches endlessly, like a hallway with no doors. Time doesn’t move in places like this, it drags, it folds, it suffocates. Aunt Tracy has gone home to shower, her parting words soft but firm, “Rest. Your body needs you to rest now.”

Rest, if only it were that simple. The dim light above my bed hums quietly, the only sound competing with the beeping of the small monitor attached to my finger. Every beep reminds me I’m alive. Every beep reminds me something else is alive too, something inside me.

My hand drifts to my stomach again. I press my palm lightly there, as if I might feel something. A flicker, a whisper, a sign, But there’s nothing, no flutter, no shift, just silence. Yet the doctor’s words repeat in my mind like a curse I didn’t know I was waiting for.

“You’re pregnant.”

I still haven’t processed them. My brain refuses to hold the syllables in place, they keep sliding away, too heavy to stay, too powerful to accept. I exhale shakily, staring up at the white ceiling stained with old watermarks. I trace them with my eyes like they’re constellations, stories someone left behind for me.

A story I never asked for, my throat tightens. “How am I supposed to do this?” I whisper into the empty space. My voice sounds small, hollow, like something leaking through a c***k. No answer comes, of course it doesn’t.

Another pang shoots through my abdomen, not sharp, just heavy. The doctor called it “stress tension” my body responding to everything falling apart, stress. That must have been what happened in the flower shop when I collapsed. All the customers blurred into colours, my hearing faded, and then the announcer on the TV said his name.

Alexander Kane and Cassandra Whittaker officially set their engagement ceremony…

My chest had caved in, my knees buckled, and then darkness swallowed me whole. I blink away memories, but they push through anyway, vicious and relentless. His laugh, the warmth of his hands on my waist, the way he whispered my name like it mattered, the night we shouldn’t have had, the night that changed everything.

I squeeze my eyes shut. “Stop thinking about him.”

But how?

How do you erase someone who carved themselves into the inside of your skin? The curtain beside my bed shifts slightly from the draft of the AC. Margaret must be asleep. I heard her nurses earlier, gentle voices, careful words, the kind reserved for someone important. I wonder if Alex knows she’s here.

My heart kicks hard at the thought, and a wave of guilt crashes into me so fiercely I grip the bedsheet. “I shouldn’t be here,” I whisper. “Not this close.” But where else could they put me? I don’t have money for special wings or private arrangements, I barely had a job. I barely had a home.

My mother’s words echo through my mind like a slap, “You let a man disgrace you! And you want to stay under my roof? Shame on you, Lavender!”I flinch even now, the memory burns. She didn’t even listen, didn’t ask. She just pointed to the door and said nothing else.

If Aunt Tracy hadn’t taken me in, I would be on the streets. A tear slips down my cheek. I wish things were different. I wish I didn’t feel so alone. I wish the father of this child wasn’t a man engaged to someone else. My voice cracks when I whisper, “I’ll protect you… even if he never knows.” Another tear, then another.

I wipe them quickly, but more come. “Please,” I whisper to myself. “Just let me breathe. Let me survive this.” The darkness outside deepens. The noises of the hospital fade into the quiet hum of night. My palm rests gently on my stomach again, and for the first time since the news… I don’t feel panic.

Just fear.

And a strange, fragile sort of hope.

ALEX’S POV

The hospital smells like antiseptic and cold metal, clean, sharp, and sterile. I’ve grown to hate it, yet walking through these white corridors brings a strange comfort today. Grandmother is better, the words echo in my chest, loosening a knot that’s been strangling me for days.

When I enter her room, the monitors are calmer. The green lines move steadily, rhythmically, nothing like the chaotic spikes from the night she collapsed. I pull a chair closer to her bed and sit, resting my elbows on my knees.

“Hey,” I murmur softly. She doesn’t open her eyes, but her breathing is stronger. More certain. The doctors say she responded well overnight. I let out a long breath I didn’t know I’d been holding.

“I thought I was going to lose you,” I whisper.

The room is quiet except for the soft hiss of the oxygen flow. Her hand rests loosely on the sheets, and I wrap my fingers around it, pressing my thumb gently over her knuckles.

“I need you,” I admit. “I need your stubbornness, your honesty, your ability to tell me when I’m being a coward.” I swallow hard, because I have been one, in more ways than one. I push back in the chair and stare at the window, where the night sky glows faintly with distant city lights. Lavender loved lights like these.

Lavender, her name hits me like a sucker punch every time. I lean back and rub my forehead with both hands. I’ve searched for her everywhere. Contacts… former coworkers… old addresses…

Nothing, she vanished. She even changed numbers. Who changes numbers anymore?

Part of me is terrified something happened to her. Another part of me wonders if she’s safer far away from the disaster that is my life. My chest tightens painfully. I replay the last moment I saw her, the confusion in her eyes, the fear, the desperation to run from me. She thought I betrayed her. Thought I chose Cassandra.

She never gave me a chance to explain. Well… could I blame her?

Mother’s voice floats into my thoughts:

“The engagement will go forward. You owe the family name stability.”

Then Cassandra’s words:

“Everyone expects this, Alex. We’re perfect together.”

Perfect, nothing about any of this feels perfect. I stand and start pacing the quiet room. My grandmother shifts slightly in her sleep, pulling my attention back. I soften, moving to tuck the blanket around her shoulders.

“I’ll fix this,” I whisper. “All of it.” But as I say the words, a strange heaviness settles over me, like a storm gathering in a sky I can’t see. I check my phone again, till nothing from Lavender.

Nothing at all. My mother wants to move forward with engagement plans. Cassandra keeps calling. Investors are circling. Expectations pile up like stones on my back.

Yet the girl I want, really want, is nowhere. And the worst part? I feel something is wrong. I feel it in my bones, in my chest, in that place behind my ribs that still remembers the warmth of her skin.

“Where are you?” I whisper into the silent room.

No answer. Just the faint sound of nurses wheeling a cart past the hallway.

Just the steady beeping of my grandmother’s machine.

Just the reality that the woman carrying my child, though I don’t yet know it, is in a room I haven’t even noticed. Just a thin wall away.