Chapter 21 Nolan #2
“Morning sickness?” he’d asked after the third time, standing outside the door with his arms crossed.
I’d frozen, sure I was about to be fired.
“My wife had it bad with our first,” he’d said instead. “Couldn’t keep anything down for four months. There’s ginger ale in the walk-in. Help yourself.”
I’d almost cried. Again. The hormones are making me ridiculous.
The tutoring picks up faster than I expected.
Dev’s friend puts me on the list, and within a week I have three regular students. By the end of the month, I have seven. Word spreads—there’s a guy who can actually explain enzyme kinetics, who doesn’t make you feel stupid for not understanding, who charges less than the official tutoring center.
I meet them at coffee shops and library study rooms, going over practice problems and breaking down concepts until the light bulb clicks on behind their eyes. It feels good in a way I’d forgotten—this sense of being useful, of having something valuable to offer.
I add ecology to my repertoire when one of Dev’s classmates gets desperate before a midterm. Then intro chemistry. Then biochemistry for pre-med students who are one failed exam away from watching their dreams collapse.
Between the bar and the tutoring, I’m almost making enough to survive.
Almost.
The prenatal appointments aren’t cheap. Neither are the vitamins, or the extra food I need even when I can barely keep it down, or the warmer clothes I had to buy when the Pacific Northwest autumn turned out to be a lot colder than I’d prepared for.
My savings dwindle. Not as fast as I feared, but faster than I’d hoped.
I start keeping a spreadsheet, tracking every dollar in and out. It becomes a kind of ritual—every night before bed, I update the numbers and calculate how long I can last if nothing changes.
The answer hovers around three months. Maybe four if I’m careful. After that—
I try not to think about after that.
I call Ellie every few days.
She keeps doing better—really better, not just putting on a brave face better.
I listen to her updates and try to focus on the good news instead of the guilt eating at my chest. She’s getting better because I made a deal with the devil. I’m hiding in Oregon because I’m too scared to face the consequences.
We don’t talk about Erik. Not directly.
But sometimes, in the silences between sentences, I can hear the questions she’s not asking. I can feel her wanting to know if I’m okay, really okay, or if I’m just saying what I think she needs to hear.
I tell her about the house, about my housemates and about the bar and the tutoring and the way Portland feels like a different planet from everything I’ve known.
I don’t tell her about the nights I lie awake with my hand on my stomach, wondering what the baby will look like. Whether it will have his eyes or mine. Whether it will ever know him.
I don’t tell her that sometimes, when I’m half-asleep, I reach across the bed expecting to find someone there. That the emptiness of waking up alone feels like a physical wound that won’t heal.
The withdrawal is brutal. It doesn’t get easier. I just get better at functioning through it.
Week eleven.
The nausea is finally starting to ease. Not gone—not even close—but manageable. I can eat breakfast now without immediately losing it. I can smell coffee without gagging. Small victories.
I’m sitting in my room after a tutoring session, updating the spreadsheet, when my phone rings.
Ellie’s face fills the screen.
“Hey,” I say, smiling. “Everything okay?”
“Everything’s fine.” But there’s something in her voice. Something careful. “I just—I need to tell you something, and I don’t want you to freak out.”
My stomach drops. “What happened?”
“Nothing happened. I mean, nothing bad. It’s just—” She takes a breath. “Erik came to see me.”
The world goes very still.
“What?”
“He showed up at the hospital. A few days after you left.” She’s talking fast now, like she’s afraid I’ll hang up before she can finish. “He was looking for you. He said he needed to talk to you, that it was important. I told him I didn’t know where you were.”
“Ellie—”
“I didn’t tell him anything, Nolan. I promise. I said you’d left town and I didn’t know where, and that’s all I said.” She pauses. “But he keeps coming back.”
“What do you mean he keeps coming back?”
“He visits. Every few days. He says he wants to make sure I’m okay, that the treatment is going well. He brings—” She laughs, a little helplessly. “He brought me flowers last time. And those cookies from that bakery I like. The expensive ones.”
I don’t understand. This doesn’t make sense. Erik evicted me without warning, looked at me like I was something he’d scraped off his shoe, made it clear I meant nothing to him.
Why would he be visiting my sister?
“I don’t know what his angle is,” Ellie continues. “But I wanted you to know. In case—I don’t know. In case he finds you somehow.”
“He won’t find me.” My voice comes out steadier than I feel. “There’s no trail. I made sure of it.”
“Okay. Good.” She’s quiet for a moment. “Nolan... he seems different. I don’t know how to explain it. He’s still him—still intense and kind of scary—but there’s something else there now. He looks at me like he’s looking for answers, and I think the questions are all about you.”
I close my eyes. Press my hand against my stomach.
“It doesn’t matter,” I say. “Whatever he’s playing at, it doesn’t matter. He made his choice. I made mine.”
“But what if—”
“Ellie.” My voice comes out sharper than I intended.
I take a breath, soften it. “I can’t. I can’t do this.
Not now. I need to focus on—” I almost say the baby.
I catch myself just in time. “—on getting settled. On building something here. I can’t spend my energy wondering what Erik Nilsson is thinking or feeling. ”
She’s quiet for a long moment. “Okay. I understand.” A pause. “I love you, you know. Whatever happens.”
“I love you too.”
We hang up, and I sit there in my small room in my borrowed life, trying to process what she’s told me.
Erik is looking for me.
The part of me that’s still, despite everything, bound to him by chemistry and want and something that might have been love—that part flares to life, desperate and hungry. He’s looking. He cares enough to look.
But then I remember the contract I signed. The clause about custody. The way he looked at me in that Bureau meeting, like I was nothing.
He knows. He must know about the baby—why else would he suddenly be interested? And if he knows, then he’s not looking for me because he cares. He’s looking because of the clause. Because he wants what I signed away when I was desperate and stupid and believed things might somehow work out.
I will not let him take my child.