The ride home was silent.
Zane drove with both hands clenched on the wheel.
He kept looking over at me, his eyes red and worried.
I stared out my window.
The city lights slid past, not really reaching me.
The pain in my body was a steady, deep ache.
But the feeling in my chest was worse.
Empty.
Like everything inside me had been scraped out.
Jovi’s POV
Meanwhile on the other side of the city, Vance’s car was quiet and cold.
He drove without a word, his face hard in the dashboard light.
The quiet between him and Jovi was different tonight.
It was heavy, filled with what we had all just seen and heard.
Jovi sat in the passenger seat.
The printed sonogram was in her hand.
She looked at her husband.
She knew all his silences.
The angry one.
The bored one.
The one where he was thinking about work.
This was new.
His shoulders were tight, like he was carrying something heavy.
His jaw was clenched.
But it was his eyes.
They were looking at the road, but they seemed far away.
He was seeing the hospital room.
The dark screen.
The sound of my scream.
He looked lost.
Like he was the one who had lost something precious.
The understanding moved through her, cold and slow.
He wasn’t just shocked.
He was hurting.
For me.
For my loss.
The way he had stood by my chair, his hand on mine… it wasn’t just about looking strong.
It was real.
She had the baby, safe and growing, on the paper in her hand.
But he was somewhere else, mourning with another woman.
“You never see me the way you see her,” she said.
Her voice was quiet in the hum of the car.
Vance didn’t turn.
He didn’t move.
He had heard.
And he didn’t say she was wrong.
Then, slowly, he reached over and rolled down his window.
Cold night air rushed into the car.
He put his elbow on the window frame and leaned his head into his hand.
He stared straight ahead at the road, but his face was tense.
His mind was somewhere else, and it wasn’t a good place.
Jovi watched him.
The cold air blew on her skin.
She had wanted him to care, to really look at her, for so long.
Now he was, but it was because of another woman’s pain.
She looked down at the sonogram.
It didn’t feel like a victory anymore.
It felt small.
He was on the other side of this now, and she was alone with her good news.
End of JOVI’s POV
Back to my apartment.
Zane helped me up the stairs.
His arm was too tight around me.
The apartment smelled like him.
Like his soap.
Underneath, I could still smell a trace of Jovi’s perfume.
A little ghost of her in the air.
“Here, sit down,” he said, guiding me to the couch.
He didn’t know what to do with his hands.
“Do you want something? Tea? Water? I have that ginger ale you like.”
”Just water,” I said.
My voice was rough.
He hurried to the kitchen.
I heard the cabinet open, the water run.
He came back with a glass and a blanket from our bed.
He tucked it around my legs, his movements careful and unsure.
He sat on the coffee table in front of me, so close our knees almost touched.
He just looked at me for a long time.
His face was a mess of sadness and guilt.
“Nerissa,” he started.
His voice broke.
“I… I don’t even know what to say. I’m so sorry. For everything.” He reached out and took my hand.
I let him.
His hand was warm. This chapter was taken from g.com without permission.
It felt familiar.
For a second, it was like before.
A tear rolled down his cheek.
“Our baby,” he whispered.
That word, *our*, opened something up in me.
He was hurting for the idea of it.
I was hurting for the real, secret thing that was already gone.
“I didn’t know either,” I said.
My voice was flat.
“How could we have known?” he said, holding onto the word ‘we’.
He moved closer.
His other hand came up and touched my cheek.
His thumb wiped away a tear I hadn’t felt.
“We’ll get through this. Together. We can heal.”
I looked into his eyes.
They were full of real pain.
But his ‘healing’ meant going back.
Back to the way things were.
Me, the steady one.
Him, the grateful one.
“Zane,” I started to say.
“And when you’re ready,” he kept going, his voice soft with hope, “we can try again. We’ll be more careful, we’ll—”
I pulled my hand back.
“Try again?”
He blinked.
“Not right away! Of course not. Whenever you’re ready. In a year, or…”
I stopped listening.
I saw the sonogram falling from his hand at the hospital.
I saw Jovi’s hands on her stomach.
He thought this was a sad accident.
He didn’t understand that offering me another baby, while his baby grew inside Jovi, was the worst thing he could say.
The empty feeling turned into anger.
“We’ll get through this. Together. We can heal.”
’We.’ The word triggered a memory, so vivid it stole my breath.
Last winter, we’d both caught the same brutal flu.
For three days, we were a single miserable entity on the couch, a tangle of blankets and used tissues.
There was no romance in it, no passion.
Just the profound, unspoken solidarity of shared misery.
We were a ‘we’ then—a small, sick, stinking island.
That was the ‘we’ he was offering now.
Not partners in joy, but cellmates in a life sentence of regret.
I didn’t want to be that kind of ‘we’ anymore.
I stood up.
The blanket fell to the floor.
“Don’t,” I said when he reached for me.
“I just want to fix this.”
”You can’t.” I walked toward the guest room.