Chapter 129 Chapter 129
He thought I was pulling away because of fear; he didn’t realize I was pulling away because there was nothing left to hold onto. That night, he didn’t reach for me, and I didn’t move closer. The space between us felt wider than the bed, wider than the house, and wider than the silence I was keeping. I told myself I would explain eventually, when it hurt less, when I could say it without breaking, but grief has a way of turning into distance if you let it sit too long, and I could already feel something shifting beneath us.
Not shattered, not as yet, but cracking in places neither of us could see clearly, and this time, I wasn’t sure love alone would be enough to seal it.
Zaiel
I knew something was wrong before I could prove it. It wasn’t dramatic. There were no tears in front of me, no confession, and no visible breakdown. It was subtler than that; it was the way she moved through the house. It lived in the way her body went still when I touched her waist. It lived in the pause before she answered simple questions. Tessa had always been guarded, but this felt different; this felt like grief.
The first miscarriage had broken her in a way she tried to hide. I had seen it in the bathroom mirror when she thought I wasn’t watching. I had held her while she cried quietly into my chest so I wouldn’t hear the sound of it. I had promised myself that if it ever happened again, she wouldn’t go through it alone.
Now she was drifting from me in slow, careful steps.
That morning, I woke before dawn and watched her standing at the window. Her hand rested low against her abdomen, not protectively, not tenderly. It looked like confirmation. Like she was acknowledging something that no longer existed.
When she turned and saw I was awake, she smiled too quickly.“I made coffee,” she said. She had stopped drinking coffee the moment we found out she was pregnant. I didn’t correct her; instead, I watched. Observation had always been my strength. Patterns never lied.
She moved slower. She visited the bathroom more frequently. Her eyes were rimmed red despite claiming she hadn’t been crying. She avoided direct contact longer than usual, and when she did meet my eyes, there was something behind them I couldn’t reach.
Something had happened, and she wasn’t telling me. By the time I entered my office downstairs, I had already decided that if she wouldn’t give me the truth, I would find it myself. I grabbed my phone and called Joe.
“Joe”
He answered immediately. “Yes, sir.”
“I want the last seventy-two hours reviewed.”
A beat of silence; Joe didn’t question lightly, but he understood tone. He knew when it came to Tessa there were no screw-ups.
“Specify,” he asked.
“Medical facilities. Pharmacy purchases. Any unscheduled vehicle movement. Internal logs,” I said.
“Understood,” he replied.
“And keep it contained. Only you, Jax, and Rob.”
“Yes, sir.”
I ended the call and leaned back in my chair. I didn’t feel guilt about the investigation; all I felt was urgency. If she was in pain and chose not to tell me, that wasn’t independence; that was isolation. Joe called first.
“We pulled external surveillance feeds tied to the vehicle trackers,” he said calmly. “No hospital entries since the confirmation appointment; there are no pharmacy purchases out of the ordinary.” he said
Joe ran my entire IT infrastructure. If something existed digitally, he could find it.
“Phone logs?” I asked.
“Clean. No private clinic searches, no encrypted communication, no flagged keywords,” he said.
That was too clean; Tessa didn’t wipe history unless she was hiding something.
“Pull internal camera coverage for the master wing hallway,” I said.
There was a slight pause from him. “Privacy zone,” Joe reminded me.
“I’m aware,” I said, and there was another pause, shorter this time.
“Sending you what’s available.”
The footage was silent and grainy in the blind spots we intentionally left in place for privacy. She walked into the bathroom repeatedly over a twelve-hour span. Her posture was slightly bent once. At one point she braced herself against the hallway wall before straightening. I watched that frame three times.
Joe entered my office quietly. “Anything?” he asked.
“She stabilized herself against the wall,” I said.
He studied it and then paused the frame. “That’s pain.” he said
“Yes.”
Jax called at the same time.
“Boss, the staff mentioned heavier disposal from the master bathroom three days ago,” he said. “Wrapped tightly before discard. No one examined the contents,” he said. Three days ago, the same day she accused me of suffocating her, was the day she began withdrawing physically.
My chest tightened. It wasn’t fear for the child that gripped me first. It was the realization that she had endured something alone.
“Jax,” I said when he reconnected, “contact the lab we used previously. Discreetly. Confirm whether any emergency bloodwork was processed under her name.”
“Already did,” he replied. “Nothing logged.”
Which meant if something happened, it happened here, in this house, without me here and without me knowing. I dismissed them all and sat alone for several minutes.
If she miscarried again, the timeline aligned perfectly. Pain, bleeding, fatigue, and emotional withdrawal, and she had said nothing, not because she didn’t trust my power but because she didn’t trust my grief, and that was worse.
When I returned upstairs, she was sitting on the closet floor between hanging dresses, staring at nothing. She looked smaller, not physically but emotionally. I crouched in front of her. “Talk to me.”
She blinked slowly, as if surfacing from somewhere far away. “There’s nothing to say,” she said quietly. I studied her face carefully.
“You’re not pregnant anymore, are you?” I asked quietly, and her body went still; her eyes widened slightly before she controlled it. She didn’t answer; she didn’t need to.
“When?” I asked quietly.
Her lips trembled despite her effort to steady them. “A few days ago,” she whispered. The words landed heavier than I expected.
“A few days,” I repeated.
“Yes.”
“You were bleeding,” I asked, and she nodded faintly.
“And you didn’t call me.” I asked.
“I didn’t want to,” she said, and that hurt in a way I hadn’t prepared for.
“Why?”
“I didn’t want to watch you go through it again.” she whispered.
“My reaction was your concern?”
“You internalize everything,” she said softly. “You don’t show it, but I see it. I couldn’t handle that on top of everything else,” she said.
“You chose to handle it alone.” I asked.
“Yes,” she said softly. The honesty in that single word cut deeper than denial would have. I sat back slightly, absorbing it.
“You don’t get to decide how I grieve,” I said, keeping my voice even. “And you don’t get to remove me from our loss.”
Her eyes filled despite her effort to remain composed.
“I wasn’t removing you,” she whispered.
“You were.”
Silence filled the closet.
“I lost it,” she said. “And I didn’t have the strength to lose you breaking too.”