Chapter 16 Endgame #2
He sighed as he looked out onto the ocean, a strange longing in his eyes I’d never seen before.
His behavior was strange—lax and informal, and lacking the usual medical professionalism I knew him to exhibit.
His shoulders sagged as he placed his hands in his pockets and stood there in thoughtful silence.
“I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my life, Jaden,” he suddenly said, his voice light and calm.
“Done some terrible things I’ll never be able to forgive myself for.
And over the last couple of months, I decided that before I leave this earth, I wanted to do just one thing, anything, to circumvent the suffering I know I’ve contributed to. ”
I frowned at his vague confession, confused by the candidness of his words.
Yes, Sid had contributed to suffering. He turned the other cheek while Darren sold women to wealthy bidders without so much as blinking, never once reporting the atrocities to the proper authorities.
He stood by countless times, cleaning up the blood and bruises Darren had left behind on my skin, while also managing the psychological damage I’d endured throughout the years at his hands.
And while it seemed Sid tried his hardest to remain unaffected, his behavior had noticeably softened over the last year. But I kept my suspicions and observations to myself, waiting impatiently for him to continue.
“What are you saying, Sid?” I prompted him as we kept our leisurely pace along the shore.
“I’m saying I wish I could have done more for you when I had the chance. But unfortunately, my time has run its course, and I can’t push it back any longer.” A cough had ruptured up his throat, causing him to turn away and hack a light splatter of blood into the sleeve covering his elbow.
“You’re dying, aren’t you?” It was more of a statement than a question.
Regaining his composure, he sucked in a deep wheezing breath and cleared his throat.
“Yes.”
I nodded, a strange sense of sadness clenching at my chest that I had no right to feel.
This man was an enabler, indifferent to the suffering of others all around him, yet somehow, I had grown some form of attachment to him.
A reluctant, subpar ally. If Stockholm Syndrome had ever taken hold, it would’ve been for Sid.
“How much longer do you have?” I asked tentatively, wincing at the question.
“Not long,” he replied dryly, his voice now course and jagged.
“Which is why I need to tell you this now while I still have the chance. You may hate me for it, or you may be relieved, I don’t know, but I want you to know I did what I did to spare you from this fate for as long as I could prevent it.
I did what I did because you don’t deserve this life, Jaden, and neither does a child. ”
We had walked sufficiently far enough that even the wind wasn’t necessary to cover our conversation anymore, making me stop in my tracks as my stomach clenched.
“What the hell are you talking about?”
Sid stopped as well, sucking in that salty ocean air and then turned to look me in the eyes. “You’re not pregnant, Jaden. You never were.”
I felt my entire body stiffen like it had been struck by lightning. With my heart suddenly exploding with misfires, my brain struggled to comprehend what he had just said. Surely, I had misheard him? Right?
“What?” I felt my mouth fall open in outrage, accompanied by all the questions I needed immediate answers to. “What the hell do you mean I never was? How…how could that be possible?”
Sid looked white with guilt, grimacing at my reaction as he attempted to explain.
“What you have is something akin to a rare condition called pseudocyesis, also known as phantom pregnancy,” he answered plainly. “It’s a rare medical phenomenon where the patient exhibits all the usual signs of pregnancy, but without the presence of an actual fetus in the womb.”
I felt my heart race into overdrive, my breathing increasing to panic level. What the hell was happening? What did this mean? How in the fuck—
“You need to calm down, Jaden,” Sid spoke quickly. “Do not let them see you react. If your heart rate spikes too quickly, Darren will be alerted, and I won’t have the time to finish telling you what you need to hear. Come on, deep breath.”
I did as he said, breathing in slow and deep to relax the hurricane of elephants building in my gut. I certainly did not want Darren disrupting this insane confession right now.
“But…all of the morning sickness, the headaches, the fatigue, my breasts, even the weight gain? Everything I felt, wasn’t real?”
“It was real, Jaden. Your body behaved exactly as it would have had you actually been pregnant.”
I shook my head as I recounted everything that had confirmed my pregnancy, all the signs, all the symptoms, even the ultrasound!
“But we had an ultrasound. I saw it on the screen. We all saw it!” I argued, still clinging to the denial of what I desperately wanted to be true.
Sid shook his head again. “It was a pre-recorded video. I had to have the machine recalibrated so it would play the recording exactly as I needed it to, which was why the ultrasound had been delayed until it was ready. And when the recording ended, I pretended the machine had malfunctioned.”
Holy fuck.
Deep breath. Deep breath. Deep breath.
“But the heartbeat monitor? Was that also a recording?” I asked, my voice damn near breathless.
“Yes,” he answered with a nod.
“All the test results, all the exams…fabricated?”
He nodded again, wincing in the bright sunlight.
More breathing. More fighting to keep my composure.
Fuck, I was going to be sick.
“So…then…my birth control implant?”
Was it actually a dud like I had been told?
“A fresh replacement,” Sid answered. “Darren had instructed me to install a dud to keep you ignorant of his intentions, but I gave you the real thing.”
Fuck, I started to feel dizzy, the ocean seemingly tilting on its side.
This whole time…this whole time I thought I was doomed, thought this child was doomed to a horror I couldn’t stop. I thought I was trapped in a nightmare I had no hope of escaping. And now my system was crashing at the understanding it had all been false.
But then, the most overwhelming feeling of relief quickly washed over me, only to then be followed by a strange sickening wave of mistaken mourning.
Mourning for a child I had finally started to accept, but would now never know, because they had never existed in the first place.
It was the cruelest biological defense mechanism, but it had been exponentially effective.
But as I came to terms with this new truth, a ray of gratefulness began to replace my remorse. I would never have to watch that child suffer under Darren’s direction. They had been spared, just like I had hoped.
But with everything Sid had just revealed, I still very much needed to know the most important thing.
“You did all this?” I asked incredulously, still in disbelief at his ingenuity.
“Yes,” he confirmed, his voice wrought with shame and guilt.
“Why?”
Sid sighed quietly to himself, rubbing his hand along his jaw as he scrambled for an explanation.
“I thought that if there was one thing I could do to spare you the pain of having to bear that man’s child, then I would do it.
So when you came to my office for your cortisol shots or B12’s, I was also actually injecting you with a calculated recipe of hormones to stimulate your body’s response to a pregnancy.
Combined with the daily trauma you experience and your fear of becoming pregnant with Darren’s child, your mind was already in the perfect environment to develop the condition.
It actually worked faster than I could have hoped for. ”
I blinked at him. He had been injecting me with hormones? Sid really was more devious and clever than I had ever given him credit for. He’d clearly been planning this for a long time.
“Yeah, I would say it worked a little too damn well. I was sick for weeks, Sid.”
A breath of regret left his lips as he looked down at me. “I know. I felt awful, but I can’t really control what your symptoms are, Jaden. Your body decides that.”
Well, clearly my body is a fucking idiot.
“So, what, my body is just going to continue to grow and act like I’m carrying a baby? How the hell is this going to work? Will I have to go into false labor too?” I had so many questions that needed immediate answers so I could try to make sense of how any of this was even possible.
“Well, now that you know the truth, it's presumed that your brain will accept this new information and eventually stop producing the hormones that are contributing to your pregnancy symptoms. You may start noticing a difference in just a few days.”
My brows lifted in suspicion. “It’s presumed?”
Sid nodded noncommittally, his eyes softening with sympathy.
“Pseudocyesis is a psychopathological clinical syndrome. It’s typically treated just like any psychological condition, so treatment usually consists of emotional support and behavioral therapy, sometimes medication.
But the only reason you truly believed you were pregnant was because I told you so, not because your brain convinced you that you were, so I imagine you will recover from this much faster than most. Especially because we both know you don’t actually want to be pregnant right now. ”
I furrowed my brows at him, still struggling to process this as real.
“So now that I know the truth, my body will just start to revert to normal?”
“Eventually, yes,” he confirmed.
I looked away from him to stare out blankly into the ocean.
If my body went back to normal, Darren would no longer believe I was pregnant either once he realized my stomach wasn’t growing.
And then what would Darren do once he caught on to the deception?
How long did Sid think he could keep this going?
What the hell was the endgame in all this?