Waverly's POV
The monitor beside me has a heartbeat on it, and for the first time in thirteen weeks, I let myself listen to it without bracing for silence.
The doctor used the word "stress-related" like it was a minor footnote. Like my body hadn't spent the last two hours trying to convince me I'd lost everything that mattered.
Stress-related cramping, no damage, rest for a week, and a heartbeat so insistent and rhythmic it almost sounds indignant — ‘I'm still here. Did you doubt me, mommy?’
I did. I always do.
The relief is so total it's made me giddy in a way I don't quite recognize. I keep touching my own stomach just to feel the warmth of my palm against the thin hospital gown, grounding myself in the reality that something still lives there.
The door opens and Beckett steps in, jacket on, hands sliding into his pockets before the door has finished closing behind him. He looks like a man who has rehearsed his entrance and doesn't know what to do now that he's arrived.
"The baby's fine." I say it before he can ask, before whatever composure I've assembled has a chance to crack under someone else's worry.
"Good," he says.
He doesn't move from the spot just inside the door.
"I heard it," I continue. "For the first time. The actual heartbeat." I press my palm flat against my stomach. "It sounded like a tiny drum. Like something that had decided to exist and wasn't interested in negotiating the terms."
He should smile at that, I watch his face for it. The corner of his mouth, the shift behind his eyes… and find nothing. The steel blue is there, looking past my shoulder at something technically in the room with us, but he won't land on my face.
"That's good," he says again.
Then he moves toward the window, his hands stay in his pockets.
I watch him cross the room and position himself with the glass at his back, arms loose, shoulders held in that specific way that means a person is trying not to look like they're holding themselves together.
I've worn that posture for eight years. I know it from the inside.
"When the doctor confirmed it, I pressed my hand right here." I touch my stomach again. "And I made the baby a promise."
Beckett's gaze drifts toward me, then away.
"I told it I'd choose it first. Above the company, above the divorce, above my own fear." I let the words sit between us. "I meant it. I mean it right now, sitting here."
"I'm glad," he says. The third variant in a set that's starting to feel like a door being closed, one lock at a time.
"I already love this child in a way that doesn't feel proportional to fourteen weeks." The words come out quieter than I intend. "It's not rational, I know. I've lost pregnancies further along than this… but logic stopped being useful the second I heard that sound." I look at him. "I want to be a mother more than I've wanted anything. I want this."
Beckett is looking at the window now. The city beyond the glass is indifferent and bright, and he watches it like it's the most important thing in the room.
With each sentence I've given him, something has evacuated his expression — not gone cold, exactly, but sealed. The man who told me I could be weak with him, who kissed me in a dark kitchen while a storm made the world smaller, has pulled so far behind his own face I can barely find him.
"Are you okay?" I ask.
A beat. "I need to leave."
"Beckett…"
"I'll check on you tomorrow." He turns from the window, and the movement is controlled in that particular way where control is all that's holding the shape of a person together.
He starts toward the door and I reach for his arm. His right arm, the bandaged one — I forgot, and my fingers close over the gauze before I remember. He pulls back like I've pressed a wound, which I have, but not the one I can see.
"I'll check on you tomorrow," he says again, quieter now, and walks out before I can build a question fast enough to catch him.
The door swings shut and I stare at the empty rectangle of the doorway and replay the last ten minutes, searching for the moment it changed. The second he stepped inside the room, he was already somewhere I couldn't reach.
He looked like a man who'd already decided something.
Like a man who came to say goodbye and hadn't worked out the words.
The monitor beeps as I pull my palm from my stomach and place both hands flat on the thin hospital blanket.
My phone lights up on the bedside table. Nadia.
"I have good news." She doesn't lead with pleasantries — it's one of the things I respect most about her. "We've built enough of a case to challenge Gary's claim to the company. The financial mismanagement trail is solid — his decisions after he removed you from the operating agreements were reckless, and we can prove it with the documentation Beckett's team recovered."
I sit up straighter. "How long?"
"Weeks. We force a settlement, you get your rightful share, and the acquisition timeline accelerates. The deal is almost done, Waverly."
"That's…" I pause. "That's everything we wanted."
"It is. Get some rest. I'll send the preliminary breakdown tonight."
She hangs up without ceremony and I set the phone face-down on my knee.
I should feel the triumph of it. I built toward this from the night I packed a suitcase in a hotel room Gary had locked me inside. This exact moment, the legal ground finally shifting, the company I bled for finally tilting back toward my name.
I should feel it land with the weight it deserves.
Instead I think about a man's shoulders held tight against a hospital room window, and the five words he said in rotating order until he ran out of reasons to stay.
Good. That's good. I'm glad.
The deal is almost done. Which means the arrangement that gave Beckett and me a reason to orbit each other — a structure, a purpose, the clean fiction of mutual interest — will dissolve.
And whatever is underneath it, whatever has been building in dark kitchens and storm-lit hallways and the space between an alley and a bandaged arm, will have nothing left to hide behind.
The monitor keeps its small, insistent rhythm beside me.
I don't know what he is to me. And in a few weeks, I won't have the business deal to pretend I haven't been asking.