Chapter 21
1187 Words
*Eliza's POV*
I woke up smiling.
Which was new.
I lay there for a moment just letting it sit on my face, this strange, unfamiliar warmth, trying to remember the last time I had opened my eyes in the morning and felt something other than the cold hollow weight of a marriage that didn't want me in it.
Alexander had held my hand.
All night.
I kept coming back to that. He had sat in that chair beside my hospital bed and held my hand and fallen asleep there... that uncomfortable chair, and still not a single complaint and when I had woken up and tapped his head and looked into his tired eyes, the first thing he had done was apologize. Not defensively. Simply and fully and looking right at me.
I had replayed it approximately forty seven times through the night.
I was not ashamed of that.
I climbed out of bed carefully ... my head still ached at the edges, a low persistent throb and padded to the mirror. The bandage was neat. The bruise below it was not. I touched it lightly and winced.
Worth it, a small terrible voice in my head whispered.
I told that voice to be quiet.
"You're not coming," I told Alexander at the door.
He already had his keys.
"I'm coming," he said.
"Alexander. It is a routine check-up. They are going to look at my head, nod, and send me home. You do not need to be there for that."
"I want to be there for that."
I stared at him. He looked back at me with an expression of complete, infuriating calm.
"You said you would take care of me," I said.
"Correct."
"Taking care of me does not require you to sit in a waiting room while a doctor looks at my stitches."
"I disagree." He opened the front door and held it. "After you."
I opened my mouth.
Closed it.
And walked through the door.
He smiled behind me. I could feel it without even looking.
The hospital was busier in the morning. Alexander walked beside me to the reception desk and immediately reached for the clipboard before I could.
"I can fill my own form," I said calmly.
"I know." He uncapped the pen. "What's your blood type again?"
"Alexander, this isn't necessary..."
"B positive, right? Or is it O?"
I sighed. "B positive."
"B positive." He wrote it down with great satisfaction. I watched the side of his face , it was focused, unhurried and felt that warmth again, spreading quietly through my chest like sunlight through glass.
"Stop it" I told myself. Do not make this bigger than it is. He feels guilty. That is all this is.
But he was here. He had come. He was filling in my form with his neat handwriting and he hadn't complained once, and that had to mean something.
Didn't it?
I turned away from him and looked around the waiting room , the rows of plastic chairs, the children's corner and my eyes stopped at a view..
Walking through the far entrance, not thirty feet away, was a face I would know anywhere.
Because it was my face.
Elena.
She was here. She was walking between a tall dark-haired man on one side and a woman on the other ... and she was — she was —
My eyes dropped.
The air left my lungs completely.
Elena had a baby bump.
Not immediately obvious if you weren't looking. But I was looking, and I knew my sister's body the way you only know someone you shared a womb with, and that gentle, unmistakable curve beneath her coat was absolutely, undeniably real.
She was still pregnant.
She's still pregnant.
My heart started slamming. Loud and fast and terrible, like it was trying to break out through my ribs. I could feel the sweat rising at my hairline, my palms going clammy, the back of my neck prickling hot.
She couldn't see me. She absolutely could not see me. And more importantly...Alexander could not see her. Not now. Not today. Not when things between us had just ...not when he had only just started to ....
I spun around.
"I want to go home," I said.
Alexander looked up from the clipboard. "What?"
"I want to go. Right now. Let's go home."
He blinked. "Eliza, we just got here."
"I know, I know, but I feel fine, honestly, my head feels completely fine and I don't think I actually need..."
"You have stitches in your head."
"Minor ones..."
"Eliza." He put the clipboard down and looked at me with the focused attention of a man who had decided he was in charge of my health whether I liked it or not. "You are not leaving without a check-up. The doctor said.."
"The doctor was being cautious, it is literally their job to be cautious"
"...No Eliza"
"Alexander, please, I really just want to go home, can we please just".
He looked up and ofcourse he saw her. "Elena."
Everything stopped.
His voice. The way he said it. Quiet. Almost to himself. Like the word had come out without permission.
I turned slowly.
Alexander was no longer looking at me.
He was looking across the waiting room. His face had gone completely still , not angry, just ...arrested. Frozen in place. Like someone had pressed pause on every single thing happening inside him and he hadn't noticed yet.
Elena was closer now. She hadn't seen us. She was laughing at something the tall man beside her had said, her hand resting lightly on her bump, her whole face open and unguarded in the way it only ever was when she felt safe.
"Elena," Alexander said again. Still barely above a breath.
Then his eyes dropped.
And I watched the exact moment he saw it.
The stillness in his face cracked. Something moved behind his eyes ... confusion first, then something sharper, something that was working very fast to put pieces together that didn't fit the picture he had been given.
He turned to me.
"Eliza." His voice was very controlled. "You told me she aborted the baby."
My mouth went dry.
"You told me," he continued, each word landing with quiet precision, "that Elena terminated the pregnancy. That there was no baby. That it was over." He looked back across the room at her bump. Then back at me. "So why is she still pregnant?"
"I—" The word came out hollow. My throat had closed completely. "I can explain—"
"Did you lie to me?"
The question sat between us like something sharp.
I opened my mouth.
Nothing came out.
Not a single word. Not a syllable. Because there was nothing — no explanation, no version of this that didn't unravel everything, no sentence I could form fast enough to stop what was already happening.
Alexander looked at me for one more second.
Then he turned and walked straight across the waiting room toward Elena.
"Alexander—" I grabbed at his arm. Missed. "Alexander, hold on — come back—"
- Writer
