Chapter Nine #3
The lance of remembered pain makes me push the files around with restless fingers, reading through each in turn. The first two—familiar, already weighed and hedged on before. The hedging today convinces me they probably won’t make the cut.
The third makes me pause. He ticks every box.
And yet…something holds me back. A stubborn resistance I can’t name.
Maybe it’s that the perfection feels clinical, detached, manufactured.
Maybe it’s because, no matter how immaculate the résumé, I can’t shake the image of another man—the one whose flaws I know too well, whose touch I can’t seem to forget.
I shove it aside, pulse thudding in my ears, and pick up the last file.
And… God. On paper, he’s impeccable. Height six-two. Athletic build. Genetic markers that scream strength and resilience. A flawless health record, no hereditary diseases, high IQ. He’s perfect. The kind of man you’d want as the genetic blueprint for your child.
A balance of creativity and analytical prowess in his aptitude tests. Sportsmanship awards, an academic scholarship, leadership traits noted again and again. It’s almost too good to be true.
Then my eyes snag on one line, buried halfway down the personal statement page.
‘Believes discipline and creativity are two sides of the same coin—structure is what allows beauty to thrive.’
A tremor ripples through me. It sounds familiar. Have I heard those words spoken to me before? Maybe in beautiful Accra, or on a humid night in Lisbon?
I glance up but Theo’s eyes, steadily watching me, unblinking, are impenetrable. I lower mine quickly before he can read the wishful thinking in them. Then I shake it all off, forcing a laugh at my own foolishness. It’s a coincidence. My subconscious talking. It has to be.
The world’s full of confident men who talk in poetic riddles to sound profound.
Still, I linger on the sentence longer than I should.
If only I had his photo.
A vanity, yes, and entirely wrong. But the yearning for something tangible, something I can look at and pretend? It almost overwhelms me.
The skin at the back of my neck prickles.
Theo is still watching me. I don’t have to look to know it. I can feel the weight of his stare pressing against my skin.
Slowly, I lift my gaze. Meet his eyes across the small table. He doesn’t look away. Neither do I.
The knock on the door startles me. A nurse pokes her head in. ‘Miss Rockson? Have you made your choice?’
I close the file with steady fingers, rise on legs that don’t feel steady at all. ‘Yes.’
I grab the four folders.
And without another glance at Theo, I follow the nurse out.
The process itself isn’t dramatic. No flashing lights.
No life-changing pronouncements. Just a nurse with steady hands and a consultant explaining again what I already know—how to track my ovulation cycle, when the window opens, how the body betrays its secrets in tiny temperature spikes and hormonal whispers.
I nod in all the right places, though my throat is dry, my pulse unsteady.
Theo sits beside me, silent as stone, his presence both anchor and weight. He asks no questions this time, doesn’t interject or try to steer. And yet his stillness vibrates with something I can’t name.
Later that evening, in the suite, I set my alarm for 6 a.m. the following morning to chart my basal body temperature.
When the number reads higher than yesterday’s, I mark it down like a general plotting her battle.
Cervical mucus consistency, luteinising hormone strips, all of it.
My life reduced to metrics and biology, the language of hope and fear stitched into clinical precision.
And then, just like that, a week is gone.
My body is ripe. The window is open.
I know it in my bones, the way women must have known for centuries before science offered proof.
Then we’re back at the clinic.
I should feel calm. Resolved but giddy that the moment is finally here.
Instead, I’m ragged inside, like I’ve been flayed raw. Because two nights ago, Theo touched me with a poignant finality that has wedged a lump in my throat since. As if he’d decided and drawn a line under the last time he would ever hold me like this.
We made desperate, consuming love until dawn painted the sky bruised and gold. I’d fallen asleep against him, marked and owned, the taste of him still on my lips.
And since then? Nothing.
Not a kiss. Not a brush of fingers. Not even one of his cocky, maddening remarks about how irresistible I am to him. He’s pulled back, as though something inside him has slammed a door I can’t pry open.
The silence of his withdrawal has been a more lethal blade than any insult he could wield.
I’m beyond bereft.
There have been moments, God help me, when I almost wanted to call it all off. To say no to the sterile clinic and yes to another night in Theo’s bed. To gamble everything on the possibility that what I feel for him isn’t one-sided, that maybe, just maybe, he’s falling, too.
But what if he isn’t?
What if he confirms that all I am, all I have ever been to him is an indulgence, a flame to be burned through before he sets me aside for someone easier, less complicated, less broken?
I won’t beg. I won’t lower myself to ask. I’ve done that before and the scars still throb.
So here I am.
Back under these sterile lights, dressed in a thin gown that offers no protection at all. Ready to go through with it.
Because love, unasked for, unreturned, is no foundation for the future I crave.
A baby. My baby. Mine alone.
Even if it shatters me to pieces to take this step without him.