POV: Jasmine
The apartment door barely closed behind us before Nora was off the couch and in my face.
"Two hours." She held up her phone like evidence in a murder trial. "Two hours of texting you while my imagination invented seventeen different disasters. You look like roadkill someone tried to resuscitate."
"Cemetery." The word scraped out of my throat. "Visiting my mother's grave. It was—"
"Save it." Nora's eyes tracked over me with surgical precision, cataloging details I hadn't even noticed myself. "Leo called me. Said you threw up at the cemetery. That you've been throwing up all week." Her voice dropped, sharp as a scalpel. "That's not grief, Jas."
"It's stress. Everything with Adelyn, Jackson, my mother dying, the trial—"
"Bullshit."
The word cracked through the room like a whip.
"I've watched you handle stress that would put normal humans in padded rooms. You don't vomit from stress. You get terrifyingly calm and start organizing spreadsheets." Nora stepped closer, her eyes narrowing into slits. "When's the last time you had your period?"
The question detonated in my chest.
I opened my mouth to answer. Closed it. Tried to grab onto a date, a memory, anything concrete. But the timeline was chaos—scandal bleeding into harassment bleeding into survival mode bleeding into the farm and the trial and coming back and trying to rebuild something from the wreckage.
When had I last bled?
Weeks? A month? Longer?
The realization crept up my spine like ice water.
"I don't know," I whispered.
Nora's face transformed. Concern hardened into something fiercer—determination mixed with barely controlled panic.
"Drugstore. Now." She grabbed her purse like she was arming for battle. "We're getting pregnancy tests. Multiple. And you're peeing on every single one until we know for certain."
"Nora, I can't be—"
"Can't be what?" She spun on me, eyebrow raised so high it nearly hit her hairline. "Can't be having unprotected sex with three different men during the most chaotic period of your entire existence? Because sweetheart, that's exactly what you've been doing. Biology doesn't give a shit about your emotional state."
Liam stepped forward, face chalk-white. "I'll drive."
"No." Nora's hand shot up like a traffic cop. "Girl business. You stay here, try not to spiral, and for the love of God, don't call your brothers until we know what we're dealing with."
She grabbed my arm and hauled me toward the door.
"Thirty minutes. Maybe we come back with false alarms and laugh about this over wine. Maybe we come back with news that changes everything." Her grip tightened. "Either way, we're finding out today." And she followed me to her car.
The drugstore's fluorescent lights buzzed like accusation.
I stood frozen in the family planning aisle while Nora grabbed tests off the shelf with the focus of someone defusing a bomb.
"Digital readout. No interpretation needed." She tossed a pink box into the basket. "Early detection—can confirm up to six days before missed period." Another box. "This one's the most expensive, so it better be accurate." A third. "And this cheap one as backup, in case the fancy ones are lying."
"People are staring."
"Let them stare." Nora marched toward the register without breaking stride. "You think I care what suburban Karen thinks about our pregnancy test collection? Maybe she'll assume I'm the one with the active sex life. God knows my reputation could use the upgrade."
The fluorescent lights seemed to pulse. This couldn't be happening.
The drugstore bathroom was a coffin made of tile and industrial cleaner.
I sat on the closed toilet lid, hands shaking so badly I'd nearly dropped two of the tests. Four sticks lined up on the paper towel dispenser like a firing squad.
"Done?" Nora's voice came through the stall door.
"Waiting."
"How long?"
"Two minutes."
"That's one hundred and twenty seconds too long. I'm growing gray hairs out here."
I watched my phone screen. Seconds bleeding into each other.
One minute.
My heart was trying to crack through my ribcage.
One minute thirty.
Please be negative. Please be a false alarm. Please let this be stress and chaos and nothing more.
One minute forty-five.
I wasn't ready for this. Wasn't ready for any of this.
Two minutes.
I looked down.
The first test: Two pink lines. Dark and unmistakable.
The second test: "PREGNANT" spelled out in digital letters that seared into my retinas.
The third test: A plus sign so bold it might as well have been screaming.
The fourth test: Double lines so dark they were almost purple.
Four tests. Four answers. One verdict.
"Jas?" Nora's voice filtered through the door. "Talk to me. What do they say?"
I couldn't move. Couldn't breathe. Could only stare at the evidence lined up before me like a jury's guilty verdict.
My fingers found the lock. Twisted it open.
Nora pushed inside, cramming us both into the cramped space. Her eyes found the tests on the counter.
Silence.
Then, soft as prayer: "Fuck."
"I'm pregnant."
The words left my mouth and the world tilted.
Pregnant. With a baby. A human being currently colonizing my uterus without consent or warning. Cells dividing, multiplying, building something that would eventually become a person with thoughts and feelings and questions about where they came from.
And then the real bomb detonated.
Which one?
Liam. Asher. Finn. Three men who'd somehow become my entire universe. Three men I'd been with—multiple times, in various configurations—during the window when this happened.
One egg. One winner. And absolutely no way to know whose DNA had crossed the finish line.
"How far along?" Nora asked, her hand finding my shoulder.
"I don't know. Eight weeks? Ten?" The math was impossible. I'd been with all of them during that window. "The timeline is—"
"A complete clusterfuck," Nora finished. "Yeah. I'm catching that."
I stared at my reflection in the mirror. Pale. Terrified. Dark circles carved under eyes that hadn't seen proper sleep in weeks. Hair that had given up on being presentable days ago.
This was the face of a woman holding a bomb she didn't know how to defuse.
"How do I tell them?" The question cracked open, desperate and raw. "What do I even say? 'Hey, one of you is going to be a father, but I have no fucking idea which one, and honestly it might not matter because this baby is going to have the most complicated family tree in recorded history'?"
"You tell them the truth." Nora gripped both my shoulders, forcing me to meet her eyes. "Exactly what you just said. Word for word. And you let them react however they're going to react. Then you figure it out together."
"What if they freak out?"
"Then they freak out together while you cry at commercials and develop weird food cravings." Her expression softened a fraction. "But those men are obsessed with you. Unhealthily, concerningly obsessed. You think a baby is going to scare them off? Please."
I wanted to believe her. Wanted to believe this wouldn't shatter everything we'd built.
But standing in that cramped bathroom, four positive tests clutched in my trembling hands, all I could feel was the ground disappearing beneath my feet.
I was pregnant with a child whose father could be any of three men.
And I had no idea how to tell them that everything was about to change.