What is to be lost

Chapter 5: Eight weeks in

I didn't notice the nausea at first.

It arrived the way certain truths do.. quietly, without announcement, settling into the background of daily life until it was simply there.

A low, persistent unease that lived somewhere beneath my ribs and followed me from my bed to the bathroom to my first lecture of the morning.

I told myself it was nerves. I had enough of those to justify almost any physical symptom.

The weeks since the procedure had settled into a strange and careful rhythm.

Anthony and I still occupied the same classroom twice a week, still breathed the same recycled lecture hall air, and still existed within fifteen feet of each other for ninety minutes.

He didn't call on me. I didn't linger after class. His eyes moved across the room during lectures the way a searchlight moves across water, steady, sweeping, and carefully arranged to pass over a specific point without stopping.

I noticed every time.

The rules were clear. We had stated them plainly in that empty classroom, with the door latched and the chairs still warm from other people's bodies.

Keep it quiet. Keep it professional. Keep our distance.

I was keeping all three. I was keeping them so well it had become its own kind of discipline, a daily practice of not looking too long and not standing too close and not letting my mind wander into territory that had nothing to do with lecture notes or essay deadlines.

But I could still feel him. That was the part none of the rules addressed. The way the room reorganized itself around his presence when he walked in. The particular quality of his attention when he spoke, focused, unhurried, like every word had been considered before being released.

The way he pushed his coat back when he wrote on the board, sleeves already rolled to the forearm, one hand moving across the whiteboard while the other rested loosely at his side.

His eyes swept the classroom every few minutes. They never landed on me.

I hated how much that bothered me. I catalogued the feeling carefully and hated it anyway.

The wave came on a Thursday.

It rose fast. A hot, rushing surge that started low in my belly and climbed, narrowing my vision at the edges and flooding my mouth with something sharp and wrong.

I gripped the edge of the desk with both hands and focused on breathing slowly, measured, through my nose the way I had read somewhere you were supposed to.

It didn't help.

The buzzing in my ears built steadily, crowding out Professor Peace's voice until her words became a distant, shapeless murmur.

My knuckles had gone white against the desk.

"Valerie?"

She had stopped mid-sentence. I could feel the class turning toward me, the collective weight of thirty pairs of eyes, and I was already standing before I had decided to, the chair scraping back with a sound that seemed enormous in the sudden quiet.

"I'm sorry." My voice came out strange, slightly too high. "I need to… I have to step out."

I didn't wait for her response.

I moved quickly, keeping one hand brushing the wall of the corridor as I went, and made it to the bathroom at the end of the hall with approximately three seconds to spare.

I barely had the stall locked before my knees hit the tile.

Afterward I sat back against the wall and breathed. The floor was cold through my jeans. The fluorescent light above me hummed steadily, indifferent.

I stayed there until the worst of the shaking passed, then pulled myself upright using the door handle and made my way to the sink.

The girl in the mirror looked like she had been wrung out and left to dry. Pale face. Damp hairline. Eyes that were too wide and a little glassy.

Pregnant…eight weeks in and already falling apart in bathroom stalls between lectures.

I ran cold water over my wrists, pressed wet palms against my cheeks, and looked at myself for a long moment.

This was real. Whatever I had managed to half-convince myself was theoretical or distant or somehow separate from the daily texture of my life… it was not.

It was here, in my body, making itself known in the most unglamorous possible way on a Thursday morning in a university bathroom.

My phone buzzed in my pocket.

I fished it out with fingers that were still slightly unsteady and looked at the screen.

Anthony..Come to my office, now!

I stared at the message for a moment. Then I dried my hands on my jeans, straightened up, and typed back.

On my way….

His office was on the second floor of the dentistry building, tucked into a quieter corridor away from the main flow of student traffic.

I had never been there before, and I climbed the stairs slowly, one hand on the railing, cataloguing the specific strangeness of walking toward him on purpose.

The hallway was empty when I arrived. I stopped outside his door and stood there for one moment, just breathing. Then I knocked twice.

"Come in."

I opened the door and stepped inside.

The office was smaller than I'd imagined, lined on two sides with bookshelves that looked genuinely used rather than decorative. Papers were stacked in organized clusters across the desk.

Late morning light came through the single window and fell across the floor in a long rectangle.

He stood at that window with his back to me, one hand wrapped around a coffee mug, his tie loosened slightly and his sleeves already rolled to the forearm. He looked like a man who had been standing there long enough to have thoughts he hadn't resolved yet.

"You looked pale in class," he said, without turning around.

"I'm fine," I said. I let the door close behind me. "It was just a little…"

"Morning sickness."

Not a question. His voice was even, controlled, but there was something underneath it, a tightness at the edges that hadn't been there in the lecture hall.

I didn't answer immediately. The word fine had already established itself as the ceiling of what I was willing to admit.

He turned then, and his eyes moved over me with the same focused efficiency he brought to everything, quick, thorough, missing nothing.

"You should have told me," he said.

I felt the familiar rise of resistance in my chest.

"You said to keep our distance."

"That is not the same thing as concealing something that could affect the pregnancy."

"I'm not concealing anything." I crossed my arms, aware that it was a defensive gesture and doing it anyway.

"I got sick once. It happens. I've read that it's normal."

"I'm aware it's normal." He set the mug down on the edge of his desk.

"That doesn't mean we ignore it."

We….

The word landed oddly, and I filed it away without examining it.

"Sit down," he said.

"I don't need to sit down, I'm…."

"Valerie." Quiet. Firm. The particular tone of someone who is not going to repeat themselves.

"Sit."

I sat.

Not because he told me to, I told myself.

Because the nausea was still making its presence known in low, persistent waves, and the chair looked solid and the room was still slightly tilted at the edges.

He crossed to the small mini-fridge in the corner, which I hadn't noticed before, and retrieved a bottle of water. He held it out without ceremony

.

I took it. Uncapped it. Drank more of it than I intended to in one go

.

"I've made an appointment," he said, returning to his side of the desk.

"Private clinic, off-campus. Discreet."

I lowered the bottle. "I don't need a doctor for morning sickness."

He looked at me with the particular patience of someone choosing not to argue with a statement they find self-evidently incorrect.

"You're carrying my child," he said simply.

"We're not leaving things to chance."

I wanted to push back. I had a whole response assembled, something about autonomy and overreach and the fact that his name on a contract did not constitute authority over my medical decisions.

It was a good response. Reasonable. Well-structured…

But the truth, the part I wasn't going to say out loud, was that it felt unexpectedly steady to be taken seriously.

To have someone respond to the information that I was struggling not with discomfort or inconvenience but with quiet, immediate action.

Even if the action came packaged in his particular brand of controlled authority, even if it looked more like management than care on the surface, underneath it, it felt like someone had noticed I was having a hard time and decided it mattered.

I was more tired than I'd realized. And more alone.

"Fine," I said.

"When?"

"Tomorrow morning. I'll pick you up."

I nodded.

He moved closer to where I was sitting, then stopped.

Something shifted in his expression, a brief loosening, there and gone so quickly I might have imagined it if I hadn't been watching carefully.

"You've lost weight," he said.

His voice had dropped slightly, the professional edge worn thinner.

"Please eat something today."

The please was what did it.

Such a small word. Tucked in at the end almost like he hadn't meant to include it, like it had slipped through some gap in his composure before he could catch it.

But it was there, and it was genuine, and it landed somewhere in my chest and sat down.

I stood quickly, before whatever was happening in my expression could finish happening where he could see it.

"I should go," I said.

He didn't move to stop me. Didn't say anything else. He just stood there with that loosened tie and that coffee mug and that careful stillness, and I turned and walked to the door and let myself out into the hallway.

The door clicked shut behind me.

I exhaled slowly, shoulders dropping about two inches from where they'd been since I walked in. I stood for a moment in the corridor, water bottle in hand, doing nothing in particular except remembering how to be alone in my own body again.

Then I turned to go.

And walked directly into someone…

"Oh…sorry!"

I stumbled back a half-step and looked up.

He was tall, with the kind of build that suggested he had once played a sport seriously and hadn't entirely left it.