Chapter 34 Andrea
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Andrea
Weeks passed and Finneas didn’t leave.
He kept showing up every morning with breakfast, kept asking me on dates I kept refusing, kept fixing things around Grandma’s house like he’d signed a maintenance contract nobody asked for.
My belly grew while the nausea faded, the bump becoming visible enough that the woman at the grocery store started asking questions and I had to learn how to say “yes, I’m pregnant” to strangers without my voice cracking.
I was almost twenty weeks when the thought hit me, sitting on the porch one morning watching him drive away after breakfast. He had a company.
He had a pack. He was a King, and he’d been living out of a hotel room in Whitebrook for over a month, running his entire kingdom from a café on Main Street, and at some point that had to catch up to him.
You couldn’t rule from a distance forever.
People needed their leader present. His company needed its CEO. His pack needed its King.
And I’d been letting him stay here, letting him settle into the rhythm of this place, without thinking about what it was costing him.
I brought it up that evening. He was on the porch, coffee going cold, watching the sunset do its thing over the mountains.
“You can’t stay here forever,” I said from the doorway.
He looked at me. “Why not?”
“Because you have a company. You have a pack. You’re a King, Finneas. You can’t run all of that from a café that puts hearts in the foam.”
“I’ve been managing.”
“Managing isn’t leading. And you know that.”
He was quiet. I could see him turning it over, the stubbornness in his jaw fighting whatever practical voice was telling him I was right.
“What if I gave it up?” he said.
I stared at him. “Gave what up?”
“The company. The pack. The throne,” he said it like he was listing groceries, casual, like these weren’t the three pillars his entire life was built on. “Someone else could take it. Luca’s been handling most of it already.”
“You can’t be serious.”
“Why not?”
“Because you built that company from nothing. Because your father left you that pack. Because you’ve been King since you were twenty-four and you can’t just hand it over like it’s a library book.”
“I’ve sacrificed enough for that title. If staying here means stepping down, I will.”
I searched his face for the bluff, the performance, some sign that he was saying this to impress me. There was nothing. He meant it. This man was willing to throw away everything he’d spent a decade building because I was standing on this porch and he didn’t want to leave.
It terrified me. Not because I didn’t believe him. Because I did.
“No,” I said.
“Andrea...”
“No. I’m not going to be the reason you lose everything you’ve worked for. You’d resent me for it eventually, even if you don’t think so now.”
“I wouldn’t.”
“You would. Maybe not this year, maybe not next year, but someday you’d wake up and realize you gave up your whole life for a woman who told you she only wanted to co-parent.
” I uncrossed my arms because my hands were shaking.
“Your pack needs you. Those people depend on you. I’m not going to take that from them. ”
“You and our baby are my priority.”
“We can be your priority without you burning your whole life down.” My voice came out firmer than I felt. “I’m not asking you to choose. I’m telling you that giving up everything isn’t the answer.”
He looked at me with frustration on his face, desperation underneath.
He wanted to fix this. He wanted to solve it the way he solved everything, with force and stubbornness and sheer refusal to accept a problem he couldn’t power through.
But this wasn’t a porch step. This was two lives that didn’t fit in the same place anymore.
“Then what do you want me to do?” he asked.
I didn’t answer. The answer was there, forming, but I wasn’t ready to say it out loud yet.
I told him about the anatomy scan a few days later, on a Tuesday morning while he was sitting on the porch with his coffee.
“I have an ultrasound on Thursday. The big one, where they check everything.” I leaned against the doorframe. “If you want to come.”
He looked up so fast his coffee sloshed over the rim. “Yes.”
“It’s at ten. Don’t be late.”
He showed up early. I got to the clinic at quarter to ten and his rental car was already in the lot, engine off, coffee cup on the roof empty and cold.
He was pacing beside the driver’s side door with his jacket off and his sleeves rolled up, which normally would have been distracting but right now was just evidence that he’d been here long enough to get restless.
“How long have you been here?”
“A while.”
“Finneas.”
“I didn’t want to be late.”
“Relax, caveman. The baby isn’t going anywhere.”
He was worse inside than the last appointment.
He hovered behind the technician asking about every dial and readout, wanted to know what each number on the screen meant, tried to read the tech’s face every time she paused the wand.
She asked him to step back twice. He stepped back approximately two inches each time.
I grabbed his hand, pulled him down into the chair beside me, and pointed at it. “Sit. Stay.”
“I’m not a dog.”
“Debatable.”
The tech squeezed the gel on my belly, cold enough to make me flinch, then pressed the wand against my skin. The screen flickered. And there he was.
The baby was on the monitor. Bigger than last time, so much bigger, a head, a spine, arms, legs tucked up tight.
The heartbeat filled the room, fast and strong, and I’d heard it before at earlier appointments but never with Finneas beside me holding my hand so hard my fingers went white.
The sound was different with him here. Fuller.
Like it had been waiting for both of us.
I watched his face instead of the screen because his face was the better view. His jaw went slack. His eyes went wide. I could see his throat working, swallowing against whatever was building in his chest.
“Everything looks healthy,” the tech said. “Good measurements, strong heartbeat. Right on track.”
My eyes filled. Tears ran down my temples because I was on my back and gravity was a design flaw nobody had addressed. I laughed, wiping my face with the back of my free hand while still gripping his with the other.
“Want to know the gender?” the tech asked.
I looked at Finneas. “Do you?”
“Healthy is all I care about.” His voice was rough, barely there. “Boy or girl.”
“I want to know.”
“Then we know.”
The tech moved the wand, checked the angle, smiled. “It’s a boy.”
I grinned so wide my face hurt. A son. I was having a son. I looked at Finneas and he was staring at the screen with an expression I’d never seen on him, not the office face, not the King face, not the groveling face. This was something else entirely. Open, stunned, cracked apart in the best way.
“A boy,” he said.
“A boy,” I said.
He brought my hand to his mouth and pressed his lips against my knuckles without looking away from the screen. My chest did something I wasn’t prepared for, a lurch, a crack, the wall shifting under a weight it wasn’t built to hold.
In the parking lot afterward the air was warm, the sun cutting through the clouds, and I was holding four printed ultrasound photos. Different angles of a tiny person with a spine, a heartbeat, and a face I could almost make out if I tilted the photo right.
I stopped walking. He stopped beside me.
I took his hand without thinking about it, without deciding, just reached for him like muscle memory, and put his palm on my belly.
His hand was warm through my shirt. I guided it to the spot where the baby was, the curve I’d been pressing my own hand against every night in the dark, talking to my son, telling him we’d be okay.
His fingers spread wide. He looked at his own hand on my stomach with that new expression, the one I had no defense against.
“I felt him move last week for the first time,” I said. “While I was reading on the porch. These little flutters, like a tiny fish swimming around.”
“He moves when you read?”
“He flutters when I do the accent.”
His mouth twitched. “Is he moving now?”
“He’s sleeping. He does that during the day and then parties all night. Just like his father.”
“I don’t party.”
“You used to grunt at me until midnight. Same thing.”
He almost laughed. I could hear it caught in his chest, half-formed, and I realized how long it had been since I’d heard him really laugh. Months. Since before everything fell apart.
We stood there in the parking lot with his palm on my stomach, neither of us moving, and I thought about his question from the porch. Then what do you want me to do?
I’d been carrying the answer since he asked.
Turning it over at night with my hand on my belly, testing the edges of it, trying to find the flaw.
I thought about my father, how he was there every morning, how I climbed him like a tree, how the best parts of my childhood were the ordinary ones.
Breakfast at the table. Reading on the porch.
His terrible cooking while my mother laughed.
I didn’t want my son to grow up in the gap between two cities, learning his father’s face from video calls instead of dinner tables. He deserved both of us, in the same place, figuring it out together. Even if together was terrifying and I wasn’t sure I was ready.