Chapter 213 Take The Test

Chapter 213 Take The Test
Chapter 213: Take The Test

Lizzie 

I sat stiffly in the enormous living room and tried to take up as little space as possible.

Sav was beside me. The rest of the Blackwoods who still had the stomach for waiting—everyone except Reginald, Ryan, and Rosalie—were scattered across the couches and chairs like people stranded after a storm, pretending the furniture made them safe. 

Roman’s men were still moving through the house, opening walls and lifting frames and checking the places no one had ever wanted checked. 

No one could really blame the rest of the family for being paranoid. If Randall had filmed us, there was no reason to assume he had been selective.

Rosalie had declined the sweep for her own rooms. My brother would never hurt me. The sentence still sat in the air like a very funny joke. 

Charlotte had tried to stay with Ryan while the family doctor looked at his shoulder. 

But he had snapped at her, so she had come back here instead, scotch in one hand, the other reaching over Alex’s shoulder to tug gently at Andrea’s cheek. 

“What a lovely little lady,” she murmured, and for a second the room remembered how to be ordinary.

“She likes you,” Sav said, watching them. She had chosen the seat next to me with a precision that was not accidental. 

Roman was across the space beside Reese. She had not gone near him.

The two brothers were talking in voices too low to catch. I still felt Reese’s glance when it found me. It was the same look from the stairs. I looked away before I could feel guilty. 

I could not meet his eyes. Not while my pulse was doing this. Not while he was waiting for a version of me who could walk into a bathroom and come out with an answer he desperately wanted. 

Sav noticed. She gave me a small nudge against my arm. “What’s going on with you? You’ve been quiet.”

I stared at my hands. “Nothing. I’m fine.”

“Don’t do that.” The word was soft. “You can talk to me. Did you and Reese have a fight?”

I shook my head and swallowed the sob that had been sitting at the base of my throat since the driveway. “No. We didn’t.”

She exhaled. Then, quieter, meant only for me: “I have the test. It’s in my purse. Do you want to do it now?”

Fear hit so fast it stole the shape of my voice. “Sav, no!”

It came out too sharp. Too loud. The living room’s low chatter cut off. Faces turned. Heat crawled up my neck from embarrassment. 

Sav blinked, then let out a small, startled chuckle. “Okay. You didn’t have to say it like that. Your choice. Whenever you’re ready.”

I stared at my knees because looking at anyone else felt impossible. “Sorry. That came out wrong.”

Her hand found my back. She leaned in until her mouth was near my ear. “You still haven’t had the conversation with him?”

Tears blurred the room. I shook my head.

She pulled me in immediately, guiding my head to her shoulder as if we were only cousins sharing a moment after a hard morning. To anyone watching, that was all it was. What it looked like from afar.

It was not. And we both knew it. 

“I don’t want to have a baby, Sav.” The whisper barely had sound. “I just don’t want one”

She rubbed slow circles between my shoulder blades. “That’s okay. There is actually nothing wrong with that.”

The permission in her voice almost undid me completely. I had expected an argument. Expectation. Instead she held me and let the sentence exist. She understood and comforted me. 

I was spiraling anyway. It felt like I had a rope around my throat and an hourglass already flipped upside down. 

My whole body had started to tremble around the possibility that something was already growing in me—that Reese’s child might already be real, already growing inside of me.

“Let’s go to our room,” Sav said, helping me up. “It’s been cleared.”

I let my hair fall forward and hid the wetness on my face as we stood.

Roman’s voice followed us. “Where are you going?”

“The bedroom.” Sav’s tone was flat, stripped of whatever warmth she usually reserved for him. “It’s clear, isn’t it?” She did not wait for the answer. She just led me out.

The walk felt longer than the house. Maybe she was still mapping and trying to remember corridors she had sworn she would never walk again. 

Maybe I was simply dragging every step because I already knew what the test was going to do to me.

Their bedroom was quiet and too clean. Sav shut the door and set her bag on the bed. I stayed near the threshold like the room might swallow me if I committed to the center of it.

She rummaged wildly—wipes, a spare toy, extra pacifiers, the ordinary debris of a life that already included children. When she found the box her face lit for half a second out of habit. 

Then she remembered why we were here, and the smile died. “Pee on this.” She held the blue stick out. “We can’t know anything until we look. One hurdle. That’s all this is.”

My hands were shaking when I took it. “Can you come in with me?”

“Of course.” No hesitation. “I’m right here.”

Inside the bathroom, Sav eased herself onto the edge of the counter with a small grimace, one hand pressed to her lower back. 

“Sorry. I have to sit. My back and my waist are literally murder today.” She laughed under it, as if the complaint were nothing. As if it was a joke. 

Like she was expecting me to laugh along with her. 

I stared at her, horrified, shocked and traumatized. “Does that happen all the time? During pregnancy and after? Don’t bullshit me, Sav.” 

She looked at me properly then, the humor falling away. “You’re scaring yourself over nothing, Lizzie. Stop. Stop writing every disaster before we’ve even looked.”

I shook my head and stared at the test like it might change its mind if I hated it hard enough. “I’m not doing it. I don’t want any of that. I don’t want another person in our lives. In our marriage. In our home. I don’t want—”

“Jesus, Lizzie.” The patience finally thinned, not unkind, just exhausted and pregnant and done watching me drown in fear. “Take the test. One step. That’s all I’m asking.”

I wiped my face with the back of my wrist and did what she said.

The whole time I prayed like someone who only remembered God when the floor dropped out. 

Negative. Please. Just this once. I don’t want to be pregnant. I don’t want another person to come between my husband and I. I don’t want my body to belong to a future I did not choose today.

Waiting was worse than the act itself.

I handed her the stick because I could not be the first one to look. I sat on the closed lid of the toilet and kept praying into my own hands. 

Sav was calm in a way that felt almost unreal. She simply held the test and watched it as if patience were a skill she had been forced to master.

My mind ran the ugly versions anyway. 

Sav’s spine suddenly straightened. And I was on my feet before I decided to stand. “So? Is it negative? Please. Please. Please.” 

She looked at me.

Then she turned the test so I could see the words clearly written there, indifferent to every prayer I had thrown at the tile.

“You’re pregnant.”

I heard a sound and realized it had come from me. “No! No! No!” 

Sav set the test down and reached for me immediately. “Breathe. Lizzie. Look at me. Breathe.”

I could not. The rope around my throat had pulled tight. My hands went to my stomach without permission, as if I could press the knowledge back in, undo the result by refusing to make space for it.

“I can’t,” I whispered. “Sav, I can’t do this. I didn’t— I didn’t agree to this. I was supposed to have time. We were supposed to have time.”

“I know.” She pulled me in anyway, one arm around my shoulders, the other still braced against the counter because her own body was already carrying more than it wanted to stand for. “I know you didn’t choose the timing. That doesn’t make you a monster. It just makes you honest.”

Honesty felt like a luxury I could not afford. In a few minutes Reese might come knocking, or Roman would ask why we had been gone so long. 

I stared at the test again. The words did not fade. They remained there while my heart tried to climb out of my chest.

“He wants it,” I said. The sentence tasted like panic. “I saw it last night. The way he said it. He already wants this and I— I don’t know how to want it yet. I don’t know if I ever will the way he does. What if I look at him and he sees that? What if this ruins everything?”

Sav cupped the side of my face and made me meet her eyes. “Then you tell him the truth before anything else. He loves you, Lizzie. He might understand.”

A tear slipped sideways into my hair. I let it.

I was pregnant. I hated the sound of it. 

And now I did not know how to walk back into the living room and still be the girl who had promised Reese that I would give him a child.