My world stopped.
The hospital room dimmed around me, sounds muffled like cotton in my ear. All I could hear was my own heartbeat, loud and erratic, drumming behind my eyes like thunder.
Pauline kept talking. Saying something. I couldn't hear it.
He wanted you to get pregnant.
Those words spun around me, circling like vultures.
Not a mistake. A plan.
The baby growing inside me, the child I had cried over, worried over, finally accepted, was never a surprise to him. Not a twist of fate. Not an accident. It was intentional.
Engineered. Orchestrated.
One giant lie.
My hand dropped from my belly as if it had turned to fire.
Pauline looked unsure now. "Alora—maybe I shouldn't have said anything. I just thought you deserved to know. And you looked… happy."
Happy?
Was I? Was I truly happy?
The nausea that gripped me now wasn't pregnancy related. It was betrayal, sharp and rising fast, threatening to choke me.
Christian had chosen this.
