Chapter 214 You’re Not Happy

Chapter 214 You’re Not Happy
Chapter 214: You're Not Happy 

Reese

I would not pretend I had missed the way Lizzie changed when the test entered the conversation. 

It had been there on the stairs, in the too-stiff nod, in the thin little yeah she had given me. 

It had been there again in the living room, when she would not hold my eyes for more than a second. She had left with Sav and had not come back. 

The longer the door stayed empty, the more certain I became that they were not talking about the weather or girl stuff. 

Roman noticed me watching the hallway. “You keep looking over there,” he said. “Lizzie?”

“Yeah.” I kept my voice down. The living room was full of people who did not need this. “She’s been off since I told her to take a pregnancy test.” 

His brows lifted. “You think she’s actually pregnant?”

“I’m almost sure of it.” Saying it out loud made the thing in my chest kick harder. “I also think she doesn’t want children. We’ve been circling the same fight for a long time. She promised me one in a year. I have every reason to believe that promise was just another way to buy time.”

Roman was quiet for a beat. “That’s heavy. Have you talked to her?”

“We’ve fought.” I watched Alex shift Andrea against his shoulder, the baby’s small fist opening and closing around her pacifier. “I can’t be the one who starts it every time, Roman. I know she’s scared of something. I just don’t know what. She will not open the door. That is the whole problem. I cannot fix a fear she will not name.”

He sat with that, eyes tracking Miles across the room. “I didn’t want kids either. After Naomi. After everything that came with her. The idea of it made me sick. I was sure that part of life was not for me.” A humorless breath left him. “Then I fell in love with a woman who decided what she wanted and did not wait for me to catch up. She stopped the pill. I was the idiot who did not notice until it was already done.”

“But you’re happy now. You love them.”

“More than my own life.” He nodded once. “That is not the point. Going from hating the thought to accepting it is not a switch. Those are different countries, Reese. You do not walk from one into the other because someone tells you it is time.”

“She’s scared.” I could hear how certain I sounded and still not be able to soften it. “It might be her parents. Whatever those two taught her. I don’t know what they put in her head. I only know it is still in there.”

“Then you find out,” he said. “You cannot solve a problem you refuse to look at.”

“How, when she will not let me in? All she does is push the date back and hope I get tired of wanting it.” The old frustration rose. “I told her I would wait ten years if that was what she needed. Ten years, Roman. That was how stupid I was for her.” 

He frowned. “That long?”

“I would have given her whatever clock she asked for.” I scoffed at myself. “Love makes you that kind of fool.”

“It does.” His mouth twitched. “Makes you pull a gun in a driveway to defend your wife even when you know she is going to take your head off for it later. She is already furious with me.”

“I noticed.”

The laugh between us was quiet.

I looked at my hands. The knuckles were still marked from the morning. “How did you get there? How did you make it easier? I know it was not simple.”

Roman drew a slow breath. His gaze stayed on Miles. “It wasn’t. At first I told myself I loved Sav enough to love anything that came from her. That if the children were hers, they were already mine. That speech lasted until I watched them take their first breath.” He paused, searching for a word that would fit. “There is a kind of love that arrives in that moment and knocks you flat. Makes you land on your bum, Reese. I cannot describe it properly. It does not feel like an idea anymore. It feels like your chest has been opened and something you did not know you were missing walks in and stays. Just makes a home there.”

I nodded. I understood enough of it to want it. That was the problem.

“See it this way,” he said. “The children were part of her. And what part of Sav have I ever refused to love? None. If Lizzie loves you, there is a version of this where the child is not a stranger she has to survive. You and the baby are not separate things. But that only works if you know what she is actually afraid of.”

“That is what I intend to find out.” I stood. “Thank you. You’re not an asshole all the time.”

His mouth twitched with a smile. “I still have the gun. Watch it.”

I left him with that and went to find my wife.

\~~~~~

She was in our bedroom, exactly where I had known she would be. 

She sat on the edge of the bed like someone waiting to be sentenced. A box of tissues sat beside her. Used ones littered the blanket. 

Her face was wrecked in a way she only got when she had already cried through the first wave and started on the second.

I was down on one knee in front of her before I finished crossing the room.

“Baby. What’s wrong?” I took her hand. It was cold. “Why are you crying?”

She squeezed my fingers and kept sobbing into the tissue, shoulders shaking in small, helpless jolts. The longer it went on, the worse the alarm in my chest became.

“Lizzie. Talk to me.”

She looked at me through the mess of it. Then she reached beside her and picked up a blue-and-white stick. She put it in my palm with a stiffness that felt like she was handing over something she hated touching.

“I did the test.” Her voice was scraped raw. “I’m pregnant.”

For a second the room went soundless.

The word on the window of the test was plain. Pregnant. I had been almost sure, and still the confirmation hit like a door swinging open into pure, beautiful light. 

A laugh that was not quite a laugh broke out of me. “You’re pregnant.” I said it again because I needed to hear the sound of it in the air. “God—Baby, you’re pregnant.”

The joy arrived too fast. It filled my throat, my hands, the stupid burning behind my eyes. I looked up to share it with her—

And the light went out.

She did not look like a woman who had just been given news she could live inside. She looked gutted. Broken open in the wrong direction. As if the same two lines that had just remade my whole future had literally ended hers.

The excitement in me stumbled, then dropped.

“You’re not happy.” I studied her face, hoping I had misread it. “You’re crying because you’re pregnant.”

“Reese, I’m sorry.” The apology came immediately, which somehow made it worse. “I’m so sorry, but I can’t. I can’t do this.”

The heat under my skin shifted. “What do you mean you can’t?”

“I don’t want to have a baby.” She shook her head hard, tears still falling. “I’m not ready. I can’t. I’m sorry—”

I took my hand back.

She stared at the empty space where it had been, startled, as if she had not expected the withdrawal to hurt.

“What do you take me for, Elizabeth?”