CHAPTER FOUR
ALEXANDER
There is not enough air in the room.
The test remains in my hand, impossibly light for something carrying this much weight. A single word is displayed on the little screen, clear and final.
Pregnant.
I look at Isabella. There are tears on her face, but only seconds ago she was smiling. She had prepared a box, bought tiny socks, and written a note because she expected this to be a celebration.
My mind refuses to fit the facts together. Isabella is pregnant, and I cannot father children; both statements cannot exist in the same reality.
“Whose is it?” I ask.
The happiness disappears from her face. Isabella stares at me as though I have raised a hand to strike her.
“Are you serious?”
“Answer me.”
“It’s yours.”
The words should reach me. They should produce something stronger than the noise building inside my skull, but they collide with a certainty engraved into seven years of my life.
Complete absence of sperm.
Not a low count, poor motility, or reduced probability. Complete absence. Three reports, two specialists, and results that left no room for hope.
“It can’t be.”
“It can.”
“No.”
“I just came from a doctor, Alexander.”
“I’m not questioning whether you’re pregnant.”
Isabella takes the smallest step backward, and some irrational part of me registers the distance as a threat.
“Then what exactly are you questioning?”
I do not answer.
“I want to hear it,” she says. “Tell me exactly what you’re thinking.”
My jaw aches from the effort of keeping it shut.
Richard’s voice returns to me. The Beaumont. A man. They looked intimate.
Then I think of Daniel Mercer, the meetings that run late, Isabella’s business trips, and every occasion on which I trusted her without asking for explanations.
Until minutes ago, none of those memories carried suspicion.
Now my mind begins rearranging them, converting ordinary details into evidence of something that may have been in front of me all along.
“Alexander.”
“Who was the man at the Beaumont?”
Her expression shifts from pain to confusion. “What man?”
“Thursday.”
“How do you know I was there?”
“Answer me.”
She folds her arms across herself. “I was working.”
“With whom?”
“Daniel Mercer.”
I know the name. Creative director at a partner agency, early thirties, single, well connected. I also know what he looks like, although I cannot immediately remember when or why I saw his photograph.
“Why were you at a hotel?”
“Because the client owns the hotel. We’re working on the rebrand.”
“Until late?”
“We had a meeting followed by dinner with the team.”
Every answer is reasonable. I would have accepted all of them without hesitation if she were not standing in front of me pregnant with a child that cannot be mine.
“Richard saw the two of you.”
“Richard?”
She lets out a short, humorless laugh. “Is that what this is about?”
“He said you looked intimate.”
“And you believe him?”
“I believe my test results.”
The instant the words leave my mouth, I recognize the blow.
Isabella goes completely still. “Oh.”
That single sound is worse than if she had shouted.
“Bella—”
“No.”
“I need to understand.”
“Then understand with me, not against me.”
She takes out her phone and holds it toward me. “Call the clinic. Book new tests for tomorrow, or today if you can find somewhere open. Call Dr. Patel and ask her to explain everything she told me.”
“That won’t change the old results.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I do.”
“You know what three pieces of paper said seven years ago.”
“They were three separate tests.”
“Then take a fourth!”
Her voice breaks, and for the first time something cuts through the anger protecting me.
Isabella is crying. She hates crying during arguments because, in her own words, tears make stupid men think they have won. Now she does not even try to hide them.
“I have never been with anyone else,” she says. “Never.”
My heart wants to believe her, and that is exactly the problem.
I would believe almost anything she told me because I need it to be true, because she is Isabella, because twenty minutes ago I was driving home thinking about persuading her to cancel tomorrow’s plans and spend the day with me.
There are twenty-one days until our wedding, and upstairs is a room where her dress is waiting.
There is an entire life arranged around the certainty that Isabella is mine and I am hers.
Yet there is a child where no child of mine could exist.
“We need a paternity test.”
She closes her eyes. When she opens them again, there is something new in them, a wound so deep that I can barely hold her gaze.
“Yes.”
Her immediate agreement surprises me. “What?”
“Do the test.”
“It’s too early.”
“There are non-invasive prenatal paternity tests. My doctor explained that today.”
Today.
Isabella went to a clinic alone, received this news, and then walked through the city planning how to tell me. I imagine her choosing those tiny socks, smiling at a sales assistant, believing I would share her happiness.
My gaze drops to the floor.
One sock is lying near the sofa. The other has stopped beside my shoe. They are absurdly small, made for feet that would fit in the palm of my hand.
The child could be mine.
The possibility hits me with such force that I crush it before it can grow. If I allow myself to hope and then discover that I was wrong, I do not know what will be left of me.
“You could repeat your tests first,” Isabella says more quietly. “Tomorrow. I’ll go with you.”
A memory surfaces without warning: Richard in my flat seven years ago, pouring whisky after the third result.
At least you know now. Better than living with doubt.
Then Richard two days ago, warning me about men who had lost everything by trusting the wrong person.
My hand closes around the pregnancy test.
“You went into a hotel with another man.”
“For work.”
“I’m trying to put the facts together.”
“No. You’re choosing the facts that let you hate me faster.”
“I don’t hate you.”
Isabella holds my gaze. “Not yet.”
The word opens something in my chest.
“That isn’t fair.”
“Fair?” Her eyes drop to the socks on the floor.
“I found out I’m pregnant by the man I love, spent the entire weekend terrified, and walked out of a doctor’s appointment today believing we had been given a miracle.
I put the news in a box for you, and the first thing you asked was who I’d slept with. Don’t talk to me about fair.”
My phone vibrates in my pocket. I ignore it.
Isabella drags both hands over her face, trying to stop the tears.
“Do you know what I thought you would do?”
“Don’t.”
“I thought you’d laugh. Maybe even cry, although you’d probably claim something had got in your eye.”
“Isabella.”
“I imagined you picking me up and then calling doctors before you’d even put me down. I thought you’d be happy and terrified at the same time.”
“Stop.”
“I’m terrified too!”
She presses one hand against her chest.
“This makes no sense to me either. I know your diagnosis, I saw one of the reports, and I helped you accept the life we thought we were going to have. But I’m pregnant, and I never betrayed you.”
Her voice lowers until it is barely more than a whisper.
“I need you to believe me while we work out what happened.”
The sentence places a choice in front of me that a man in love should be able to make without hesitation.
I look at the face I know better than any other.
The woman I wake beside, who knows that I hate coriander and that my right shoulder aches before rain.
The woman who can read the difference between my silences and who forced me to turn this house into something more than expensive walls occupied by staff.
The woman to whom I gave everything I had never given anyone else.
Then I imagine Daniel Mercer touching her.
I imagine a pregnancy, a child carrying my name, and an entire life built on a lie.
I see newspapers, lawyers, the family fortune, and the eighteen percent held in trust. Everything becomes tangled together until I can no longer distinguish fear from humiliation.
Anger arrives to protect something far more fragile.
“I want you to leave.”
Isabella blinks. “What?”
The words already exist between us. I could take them back, but doing so would require admitting that I have no control over what is happening.
“I want you out today.”
“Alexander—”
“I need to think.”
“Then think with me here.”
“I can’t look at you.”
The color drains from her face.
That should be enough to stop me. Instead, I continue, driven by a cruelty I disguise as logic.
“If this child isn’t mine—”
“It is.”
“If it isn’t—”
“It is.”
“Then explain my test results.”
“I don’t know!”
Her shout echoes through the room, followed by a silence filled only by our uneven breathing.
“I’ll get some things,” she says.
Her sudden calm frightens me more than her anger did.
“Bella.”
“You asked me to leave.”
“For today.”
She looks at me as though I am a stranger. “There is no for today after this.”
Isabella walks upstairs, and every step seems to remove something from the house even though nothing around me has changed.
I remain alone in the sitting room.
My phone vibrates again. Richard’s name appears on the screen, but I reject the call and bend to pick up one of the socks. It fits entirely in my palm.
I imagine a baby with Isabella’s eyes. Then I imagine myself holding that child, terrified I might hurt something so small because I would not know where to put my hands.
Mine.
The thought is unbearable because I want it too much.
I close my fingers around the sock.
I cannot build hope on an impossibility, and I cannot allow love to make me so blind that I accept any explanation simply because the alternative hurts.
Yet when I hear a drawer opening upstairs, some part of me begins to beg that I go after her.
Go upstairs, apologize, take the tests, and believe her.
I remain where I am, clinging to the only fact that still feels safe: I cannot be a father.
A zipper sounds faintly through the ceiling.
Isabella is packing a suitcase.
Only then does the reality of what I have done begin to settle over me. I take one step toward the stairs, then stop before reaching the first one. If I go up, she will ask me for trust, and I do not know whether I am still capable of giving it.
I look down at the tiny sock in my hand and, for the first time since seeing the positive test, I want with almost unbearable force for every doctor to have been wrong.
But I do not go upstairs.