The doctor said the heartbeat was strong. I kept my hand on my stomach the whole cab ride home, like I could hold onto that sound.
Seven weeks. A pea. A whisper.
I climbed the brownstone steps and dug for my keys. The lock felt heavier than usual. Or maybe I was just tired.
The smell hit me first.
Some kind of perfume. Sweet and green, like cut grass soaked in sugar. It did not belong to me. It did not belong to this house.
"Khai?"
I set my bag down. In the living room, a wooden bowl sat on the coffee table with a wand across it. A crystal one. There were candles I had not bought. A silk robe was folded on the arm of my reading chair, and it was not mine.
I walked upstairs slowly. The sheets on our bed were pulled back on the wrong side. A stranger's hair on the pillow. Long, dark, glossy.
My hand went to my stomach again. The pea. The whisper.
I turned, and Khai was in the hallway.
He looked at me the way you look at a delivery. "You're back."
"Whose things are these?"
"Mine." A pause. "Ours."
A woman stepped out from the guest room behind him, tying the belt of a linen kimono. She was beautiful the way expensive things are beautiful. Soft and careful. She smiled at me like she had been practicing.
"You must be Elyse," she said. "I'm Charli."
My throat closed. I looked at Khai.
He did not blink. "Charli's my partner. She'll be living here from now on. The baby you're carrying is ours—hers and mine. IVF. You already know the clinic; you signed the release last month."
I had signed a form. He had told me it was for the prenatal insurance.
"You told me," I said, and my voice came out too calm, "that it was ours."
"It is ours," Charli said gently. "You're part of this, Elyse. You're carrying something so sacred."
She tilted her head. Just slightly. Left.
Khai kept talking. He was not angry. He was not even unkind. He was reading from a page. "You'll stay on the third floor. Dr. Renata will continue the appointments. Everything you need will be provided."
A vessel. He did not say the word. He did not have to.
I think it would have been easier if he had yelled.
---
I heard my own voice from far away. "Khai. Do you remember the tree?"
He frowned.
"The magnolia. In the back. We buried a box under it. Letters. A photograph of your mother. I wrote you a card that said—" I stopped. My mouth was dry. "You said we'd dig it up on our tenth anniversary."
His face did not move.
"The scar on your shoulder," I said. "Left side. Above the collarbone. That was my bullet, Khai. I took it walking you out of that basement in Red Hook. You cried in my lap for three nights. You said—"
"Elyse." His voice was flat as glass. "I don't remember any of that. And I'm tired of hearing it."
I reached into my coat pocket. My fingers were shaking. I pulled out the photograph I kept there, the one from the beach that first summer, his arm around me, my head on his chest, both of us laughing at something the wind had done to my hair.
I held it out to him.
He glanced at it. That was all. A glance.
Charli stepped closer. She looked at the picture with a soft, sad little smile. "Oh, honey." She touched Khai's elbow. "Her attachment patterns—I mean, this is textbook. She could really benefit from someone to talk to. A therapist who specializes in—" She searched delicately. "Adjustment. So she can hold her role with more grace."
"Set it up," Khai said.
He did not look at me again.
I stood in the hallway with the photograph in my hand and understood, with a clarity that felt almost peaceful, that the man I had carried out of hell was not in this house. He had not come back with the body. Whatever this was wearing his face—I could not reach it. I would break my hands trying.
---
They moved me to the third floor that night.
By morning, my jade bracelet was gone.
I opened the velvet box on my new nightstand three times before I believed it. He had given it to me on the fire escape of a walk-up in Queens, pressed it into my palm with hands that shook so hard he could not close the clasp. I had done it myself.
I found it at breakfast. On her wrist.
She held it up to the window. "Isn't the energy in this stone incredible? Khai gave it to me. He said it was a symbol of our bond."
My eyes went to him.
He was scrolling his phone.
I touched the inside of my left wrist. Bare skin. A little pale where the jade used to sit.
I did not say anything. There was nothing to say to a man reading email.
---
Brody came on Thursday.
He hugged me at the door and did not let go for a long time. When he stepped back, his eyes did a small, quiet inventory of me—my collarbones, my wrists, the third-floor stairs behind my shoulder—and I watched something dark settle behind his face and go still.
"Tea," he said. "Upstairs."
In my new room, I told him everything in short, careful sentences. The IVF. The bracelet. The way Charli tilts her head before she cuts. I did not cry. I had already done that in the shower.
Brody listened without interrupting once.
When I was done, he set his cup down and reached into his jacket. He took my hand, opened my fingers, and placed something small and cool in my palm. A chip. Smaller than a fingernail.
"Sew it into the lining of your winter coat," he said. "The gray one. Behind the label."
I closed my hand around it.
I did not ask what it was.
I already knew.
