Chapter 215 Not A Theory

Chapter 215 Not A Theory
Chapter 215: Not A Theory 

Lizzie

He was happy.

That was the first thing I understood, and it was the thing that broke the entire room in half. The news that had hollowed me out in Sav’s bathroom had lit him from the inside. 

He had looked at the words on a stick and seen a future. I had looked at the same lines and seen the end of the only life I had come to love and cherish. 

Once he felt my reluctance, the light in him turned. Joy curdled into anger so fast I could almost hear it happen. And it was directed toward me. 

This conversation was going to become something else. I knew it before he opened his mouth.

“I don’t understand what you mean,” I said, and fear had already taken my voice and made it small. “I don’t—”

“Why do you keep doing this to me?” The words came through his teeth. “Do I look like a fool to you? Do you enjoy toying with me?”

“No. That is not what I meant. I am trying to tell you how I feel—”

“Fuck that.” He was on his feet. “We are having this baby, Elizabeth. I do not care what you feel.”

The sound that left me was almost a laugh and not funny at all. “You don’t care what I feel. Do you hear yourself? Do you have any idea how that sounds?”

“I don’t fucking care!”

The roar hit the walls and came back. I flinched so hard my shoulders came up on their own.

He kept going, the months of waiting pouring out of him in a single ugly rush. “You asked me for ten years and I said yes. Then it turned out that was just a way to make an idiot of me. You asked me for one year and I said yes to that too. Another joke. You would not let me use a surrogate. You would not give me a child. When is it my turn? Why is it always what you can live with and never what I have been standing here asking for? You're my wife!”

“Because it is my body!” The scream tore out of me before I could dress it in anything else that was softer. “It is my life. My feelings. I am your wife, Reese, not a machine you get to program when the calendar finally suits you. Do you ever stop long enough to remember that?”

“When have I ever treated you like anything else?” His hands cut the air. “What the fuck are you talking about?”

I was standing now too, a finger pointed at his chest because I needed something to do with the shaking. “Don’t you dare swear at me—”

He knocked my hand aside. Not hard enough to hurt. Hard enough to make the point. “I will speak to you however the fuck I want to. Don’t start that shit with me. If you want someone to lecture, go have a child and practice on them. Not me.” 

I shoved him. Both palms, all the helpless fury in my arms. “Do not speak to me like that.”

He only laughed under his breath, hands on his hips, the sound empty. “You are not ending this pregnancy, Elizabeth. I do not care what you are afraid of. You are not ending my child. That is final.”

“That is not how this works. You do not get to decide—”

He was in my face before I finished the sentence. Close enough that I could see the crack in his composure, the raw place under the anger. “It is my child. My heir. You cannot seriously expect me to stand here and watch you throw that away like it is nothing.”

“Throw it away?” My voice broke on the words. “Are you listening to yourself? Do you care about me at all in this, or am I just the body that happens to be in the way?”

Patience had left him. I watched it go.

“What are you so afraid of?” he demanded. “Why do you keep playing this game? Why is every version of our future a door you shut in my face?”

“I don’t want to lose you!”

The truth came out of me at full volume, ugly and shaking and finally exact.

“I don’t want to lose what we have.” I was crying again and I hated it and I could not stop. “No matter how messed up it is, no matter how crazy the world tries to make us, it is ours. You and me, Reese. The two of us. No one else.” 

He took two steps back.

Confusion moved over his face first. Then something like disbelief, as if I had started speaking a language he had not agreed to learn.

“That does not make sense.” He dragged a hand through his hair. “Do you hear yourself? A child we made with love is not a stranger walking into our marriage to steal it. You are talking like the baby is an enemy. Like it's your rival.”

“I know what I am talking about.” I wiped my face with the heel of my hand. “And do not stand there and make me sound insane for being afraid. I lived this, Reese. I watched it from the inside. Babies do not always save a marriage. They do not always soften anything. Sometimes they are the thing that finishes it. Sometimes they are the thing people point at when they need someone to blame. Like me.”

He went still.

For the first time since the test hit his palm, he actually listened. I could see it in the way his shoulders dropped a fraction, the way the next attack stayed behind his teeth.

I kept going because if I stopped I would never start again.

“I was unloved. I was unwanted. I was the reason my parents’ marriage went sour, according to every version of the story they ever told. Growing up, all I heard was what a mistake I was. How I ruined my mother’s body. How perfect everything had been before I arrived. I was the problem in that house. The only future they planned for me was marrying me off to a wealthy man as compensation for what I had cost them.”

His brows drew together. The anger in his face did not vanish, but it changed temperature. It had somewhere else to look now.

“My mother never wanted me,” I said, quieter. “She thought she did until it was too late to take it back. I do not want that. I do not want to bring a child into the world and then wake up one morning and hate it for existing. I do not think motherhood is in me, Reese. I do not think I have it.”

He was silent for a long second.

“So you think you and I are the same as your worthless parents.” It was not quite a question. “No offense.”

“None taken,” I whispered.

“That is the fear.” He said it slowly, turning the pieces until they fit. “You think this child will come between us. That something we made out of what we feel for each other will be the thing that drives us apart.”

“I know what I lived through. Do not make it smaller than it was.” My throat burned. “This is not for me. I cannot do it. I am scared, Reese.”

“Scared of what?” He stepped closer again, not crowding this time. “I am right here. It is still us. I am not sending you into this alone.”

“What if I die?”

The question left me before I could cover it in anything less embarrassing and immature. 

“What if something goes wrong? What if I do not come through it? This is not a theory, Reese. Women die. Bodies fail. I have heard enough of how your family buries women to know that love does not make anyone invincible.”

“You think I would let you walk into this without the best care money can buy?” His voice had dropped, fierce in a different way. “Lizzie. Look at me. You are frightening yourself with ghosts. We will handle the medicine. We will handle the rest. You are not going to die on a what-if.”

I shook my head. The comfort could not find a safe place to land. “Of course you would say that. All you can see is this child. It is already happening. You will choose it over me. The second it is real in a way you can hold, I will become the woman who almost took it from you. I will become background noise.” 

“What?” The word came out sharp, wounded. “What the hell are you talking about?”

I drew a breath. I wiped my face again, as if a clean face might make the next sentence survivable.

“I have made up my mind.” My voice shook and I let it. “I am sorry. I cannot do this. Not now. I am not having this baby, Reese. I'm getting rid of it.” 

I saw the change in him. 

It was not surprise. It was not negotiation. It was rage, stripped of every softer layer he had been trying to keep on for my sake. 

He closed the space between us in two strides until we were standing toe to toe, and his hands closed around my shoulders. Not shaking me. Holding me in place as if I might vanish if he let go.

“And I have made up my mind too.” The words were quiet and worse for it. “If anything happens to my child, you and I are finished. This marriage will be done.”

The air left my lungs so fast I felt lightheaded.

“You would divorce me.” I had to hear it said. “If I end the pregnancy, you would leave me, Reese.”

He did not blink. Nor think twice. 

He did not look like a man who was bluffing to win an argument. He looked like a man who had drawn a line through the center of his own heart and boldly decided he could live on one side of it. 

He looked like he'd made up his mind to live without me. And that scared me to the bone. 

“There is only one way to find out, Elizabeth.”