Chapter 133 up
“Hold still, sweetheart. Just a moment.”
The nurse’s voice was gentle, practiced, the kind of calm that belonged to people who believed pain could always be measured and contained. Evan sat on the examination chair, legs dangling, eyes fixed on Nyla’s face instead of the small cotton swab in the nurse’s hand.
“Will it hurt?” he asked.
“No,” Nyla said too quickly. “It’ll feel like a tickle.”
That was a lie—but a small one. A necessary one.
Evan nodded anyway. He trusted her with an ease that tightened something in her chest. When the swab brushed the inside of his cheek, he flinched only slightly, then relaxed again, eyes never leaving hers.
“All done,” the nurse said, sealing the sample with a soft snap. “You’re very brave.”
Evan smiled, proud, then leaned toward Nyla as if expecting praise. She brushed a kiss against his hair before she could stop herself.
“Thank you,” she said to the nurse, forcing her voice to remain steady.
The woman glanced at the paperwork, eyes flicking briefly to Nyla. “You’re listed as…?”
“Guardian,” Nyla said calmly.
The word landed heavy in her mouth. Guardian. Temporary. Provisional. A placeholder for truth she wasn’t ready to say out loud.
The nurse nodded and handed her a receipt. “Results will be ready in five to seven business days.”
Five to seven days.
Nyla took the paper with fingers that barely felt real.
The waiting began the moment they stepped outside.
It followed her like a shadow—into the car, into the quiet hum of traffic, into the way Evan fell asleep against her shoulder halfway home. She kept her eyes on the road, afraid that if she looked at him too long she might unravel completely.
At night, sleep refused to come.
When it did, it came in fragments.
She dreamed of bright hospital lights and voices layered over one another. Of hands pressing papers toward her while someone else pressed a needle into her arm. Of a cry—high, thin, desperate—that stopped abruptly, as if cut off by a door slamming shut.
She woke with her heart racing, fingers clawing at empty sheets.
Her body remembered what her mind had buried.
Days blurred together. Nyla checked her phone more often than she breathed. Every vibration sent a jolt of adrenaline through her veins. She jumped at emails, at notifications, at nothing at all.
She started counting backward.
The months she’d been told didn’t matter. The dates she’d stopped marking because they hurt too much. The time she’d lost when everything had been decided for her.
It aligned too well.
Too cruelly.
Across town, Selena watched.
She noticed the way Nyla grew quieter, more focused. The way her gaze lingered on Evan just a second longer than before. The way she flinched when the child reached for her hand—as if afraid of wanting too much.
Selena didn’t ask questions.
She never did when she already suspected the answer.
Instead, she observed. Calculated. Waited.
At night, Selena sat alone with a glass of untouched wine, replaying memories she had once convinced herself were necessary sacrifices. Signatures. Agreements. Choices made under pressure that she had labeled survival.
She told herself she had done what she had to do.
But something about the way Evan looked at Nyla unsettled her.
Children were honest in ways adults never were.
And Evan’s honesty was dangerous.
The email arrived on a Thursday afternoon.
Nyla was in the kitchen, chopping vegetables she would forget to cook. Her phone buzzed on the counter. Once. Then again.
She froze.
For a long moment, she didn’t move. The room felt too small, the air too thin. Evan’s laughter drifted in from the living room where he was building something crooked and ambitious out of blocks.
She wiped her hands on a towel with trembling fingers and picked up the phone.
LABORATORY RESULTS READY
Her pulse thundered in her ears.
She sat down hard in the nearest chair, afraid her legs wouldn’t hold her. The screen blurred as her eyes filled with tears she hadn’t earned yet.
Not yet.
“Miss Nyla?” Evan called. “Look! It’s a tower!”
“I see it,” she called back, voice tight. “It’s beautiful.”
She took a breath. Then another.
Her thumb hovered over the screen.
This was the moment everything would change—or collapse entirely.
She opened the file.
The world narrowed to text and numbers and clinical language that felt cruel in its precision.
Probability of maternity: 99.98%.
The room tilted.
Nyla’s breath left her in a single, broken exhale. Her hand flew to her mouth as a sound tore free from her chest—half sob, half laugh, half something feral and raw that had no name.
99.98%.
There it was. Undeniable. Irrefutable.
Scientific truth where memory had been stolen.
Her vision swam. She pressed her forehead against the cool surface of the table, shoulders shaking as years of suppressed grief crashed through her all at once.
She hadn’t imagined it.
She hadn’t lost everything.
It had been taken.
Footsteps padded closer.
“Miss Nyla?” Evan’s voice was cautious now. “Are you okay?”
She looked up.
He stood a few feet away, concern etched into features that mirrored her own more clearly than she had ever allowed herself to see. His brow furrowed the same way hers did when she was trying not to cry.
She held out her arms.
“Come here,” she whispered.
He didn’t hesitate.
Evan crossed the space between them and climbed into her lap, arms looping around her neck with instinctive certainty. Nyla held him like a lifeline, burying her face in his hair as her body trembled.
“I’m here,” he said, patting her back the way she had patted his. “It’s okay.”
The irony nearly broke her.
“I know,” she whispered. “I know.”
She pulled back just enough to look at him. Her hands cupped his face, thumbs brushing over cheeks she had once kissed without knowing it was goodbye.
“My Evan,” she breathed, the words slipping out before she could stop them.
His eyes widened slightly. Not startled. Not afraid.
Warm.
“Yes,” he said simply.
The certainty in his voice stole her breath all over again.
Selena felt it before she knew it.
A shift. A tightening of the air. The kind of change you sensed when a secret you had buried began to claw its way back to the surface.
She watched from across the room as Nyla knelt in front of Evan, hands on his shoulders, eyes shining with something dangerously close to truth.
Selena’s jaw tightened.
So it had begun.
She turned away before anyone noticed her stillness, her mind racing through contingency plans she had hoped she would never need again.
She had always known this day might come.
She just hadn’t expected it to hurt.
That night, after Evan fell asleep curled against her side, Nyla sat in the dark with her phone glowing softly in her hand. The lab report stared back at her, unchanged.
99.98%.
She pressed a hand to her stomach, to the place that still ached sometimes for reasons she had never understood.
“I found you,” she whispered into the quiet. “I won’t lose you again.”