Chapter Ten #2
I’d watched three former teammates go through omega pregnancies in the last two years.
Had sat through hospital waiting rooms and baby showers and the moment when Torres had looked up from his positive test with an expression I still couldn’t name.
Had cataloged the symptoms, the timeline, the way bodies changed when they were building something new.
My mind made the identification before I consciously decided to make it.
I went completely still, one hand still on the strap of my bag, the other loose at my side. The kitchen was quiet around us—just the soft tick of the clock above the stove and the sound of Jackson breathing, measured and controlled.
He watched me with his jaw set and his shoulders squared, braced for whatever came next. Waiting for me to say what we both already knew.
“How far along?” I asked, quietly and without preamble. Not are you, not is that what I think, just how far along—the question that made everything else make sense.
Jackson’s controlled expression cracked open for just a moment—something raw and unguarded flashing across his face before he pulled it back, jaw tightening, eyes meeting mine with deliberate focus.
“Three months,” he said, the words level and factual, like he was reporting a mission status rather than rewriting everything I thought I knew.
Three months.
I did the math the way I always did math, automatically and without choosing to.
Six weeks since I’d left. The mission in Istanbul.
The silence that had started the same week I shipped out.
The sympathy nausea that had dogged me through Belarus and hadn’t stopped until I’d stepped off the plane in Billings.
The number landed somewhere behind my sternum like a structural failure—not pain, exactly, but of a foundation giving way.
Three months. A child. My child, growing inside a man who’d spent six weeks carrying that knowledge alone because I’d been half a world away when the test came back positive.
The kitchen was suddenly too small, the air between us too still. I set my bag down by the table with careful movements, making sure my hands were where I could see them, making sure nothing in my posture suggested the pressure building behind my ribs.
Jackson stayed where he was, one shoulder against the door frame, eyes on my face. Waiting, still, for whatever came next.
The moment stretched between us—Montana quiet around the house, the valley spread out below, of everything unsaid suddenly too present to ignore.
I stood in the middle of the kitchen with my bag at my feet and my eyes on Jackson’s face, and tried to find the words for what was happening.
What followed wasn’t a clean conversation. I knew it even as it was happening—could hear my voice coming out wrong-ordered, questions landing in the space between us before I’d fully decided to ask them.
I kept my tone level—trained level, the kind that costs something—but the words kept rearranging themselves, important things coming out second or third when they should have been first.
“Are you okay?” I asked, the question coming out before I could stop it. “I mean, with the—“ I stopped, mid-sentence, and switched tracks entirely. “Your designation. You’re an omega?”
Jackson nodded once, his expression carefully neutral. “Yeah,” he said. “Always have been, apparently. My parents had the tests falsified when I was young. I found out the same week you shipped out.”
The pieces rearranged themselves at speed—Sterling’s blood-work comment, Burke’s careful pause before “under the weather,” the six weeks of silence that had started the same week I left, the sympathy symptoms I’d spent a month refusing to name.
My legs decided for me. I sat down at the kitchen table, both hands flat on the butcher-block surface, and looked at them like they belonged to someone else. The wood was cool under my palms, slightly rough where years of use had worn the finish.
Six weeks. Jackson alone in this house with the greenhouses and the hired hands and whatever he’d built upstairs that I hadn’t seen yet, but already knew was finished, because that was exactly what Jackson did—he prepared, he handled it, he did not ask for help.
The anger came, brief and real, not at Jackson, but at the six weeks and the Atlantic and the positive test he’d sat with alone. I let it move through me without letting it out, because Jackson was watching me with that braced expression and I would not be one more thing he had to manage.
“The due date?” I asked, forcing my voice to stay level. “And the doctor? Is everything—“ I stopped, not sure how to finish the question. “Is the pregnancy healthy?”
Jackson nodded again, moving to the counter with careful attention. He poured two cups of coffee—one for him, one for me—then brought them to the table and sat down across from me, the chair scraping against the floor in the quiet kitchen.
“Due date is end of April,” he said, his voice steady and factual. “The doctor at the clinic in town. She’s good—specializes in omega pregnancies. Everything’s healthy so far. Strong heartbeat, good development, no complications.”
He delivered it the way he delivered operational briefings—no embellishment, no theater, just the facts as he’d calculated them.
I nodded and asked follow-ups—the kind of questions that came from genuinely wanting to know rather than filling space—and Jackson answered each one with the same careful precision.
The coffee cooled between my palms as we talked—about the doctor, about the symptoms, about the way Jackson’s body had changed in the three months since I’d seen him last.
Somewhere in the middle of him describing the ultrasound—the small shape on the screen, the doctor pointing to it while Jackson sat in a paper gown telling her she was mistaken—something in my chest broke open that had nothing to do with anger or fear.
A baby. My baby. The physical impossibility that had rewritten Jackson’s entire understanding of himself.
I was going to be a father. The thought arrived as a physical fact, warm and specific, and I was not prepared for how much I wanted it, how completely unprepared I was for wanting something this un-mission-shaped.
Jackson was still talking—something about the clinic in town and the follow-up appointment schedule—but I’d stopped hearing the individual words. Just sat at the kitchen table with my coffee going cold between my hands and my eyes on his face, trying to make sense of what was happening.
He looked different—not just the physical changes, but something in the set of his shoulders, the way he held himself. Like he’d made a decision and was living with its consequences, the way he did with everything.
The way he’d done with me, from the moment I’d stepped onto his porch with a jump bag over my shoulder and no explanation for why I was there.
I looked at him across the table—the careful way he was holding himself together, the flannel shirt, the hand that had drifted to rest against his own stomach without Jackson appearing to notice he’d done it—and reached across the table.
I covered Jackson’s other hand, the one resting on the wood, not the one on his stomach, because that one was not mine to claim yet and I knew it. His skin was warm under my palm, the calluses familiar from a hundred different moments across the past eight months.
“I’m not going anywhere,” I said. Once, flat, no theater. The kind of promise that wasn’t one—just a statement of fact, the same way “the sky is blue” or “Montana is cold in October” were statements of fact.
Jackson held my gaze for a long moment, jaw tight, something complicated moving behind his eyes.
Then something in his face loosened by a fraction—the first real loosening since I’d walked through the door—and he turned his hand under mine, fingers curling against my palm in a gesture so careful it made my chest tight.
“Can I see it?” I asked, the question coming out before I’d fully decided to ask it. “The nursery, I mean. If you’ve started one.”
Jackson blinked, clearly not expecting that specific question. Then something that was almost a smile crossed his face—just a slight curve at the corner of his mouth, the kind that came with genuine surprise rather than performance—and he pushed back his chair.
“Yeah,” he said, already moving toward the hallway. “Come on.”
I followed without hesitation, my coffee forgotten on the table, my eyes on the set of Jackson’s shoulders as he led me through the house toward whatever came next.