9. Serena #2
The thought is instant and brutal. Not the boss. The man who got the naked look the first time, when everything hard fell off him and he stared at a miracle he didn’t think he deserved.
He should be hearing this. His hand should be over mine.
But he chose the tape.
So I listen to our child alone, in a room with a chair nobody is in.
“Do you want your friend to come in for the scan?” Asha asks gently.
I look toward the closed door. Matteo is outside. Waiting.
I should say no. This is too intimate. But I’m tired of being brave in rooms by myself.
“Can you ask him?”
Matteo appears in the doorway. He doesn’t walk in. Of course he doesn’t.
“You’re sure?”
“I’m sure.”
Only then does he enter. He sits in the chair beside the bed. Not too close. He looks at the monitor. Only the monitor. That restraint lands low in my chest.
Asha starts the scan. The image blooms in black and white. Then she tilts the wand, and there’s the baby.
Our baby. Small head. Curve of spine. Tiny hand near the face. Moving. Alive.
I start crying again. At this point, my tear ducts are just showing off.
Asha points out everything. Normal fluid. Good movement. She says the words the way medical people do when they don’t understand that normal is the sexiest word in the language.
The baby kicks. The image jumps.
I laugh through my tears. “Rude.”
Matteo’s mouth curves. For real this time. Not big. But there.
“Strong,” he says.
The word nearly undoes me.
I look at him. His face is softer than I’ve ever seen it. Not hungry. Not claiming. Just glad. For me. For the baby.
Dangerous.
Asha prints a strip of photos and gives them to me in a little white envelope like she’s handing over proof that I still have a future.
In the hallway afterward, I make it to the bathroom before I fall apart again.
I lock the door and sit on the closed toilet seat with the envelope clutched in both hands, like the paper might hold me together.
I cry because the baby is fine. I cry because Rocco missed it. I cry because part of me wants to send him the photo and another part wants him to know there’s a photo he doesn’t get.
Petty? Yes. Pregnant? Also yes.
Someone knocks softly. “Serena?”
Matteo.
“I’m fine.”
“Because you’ve been in there nine minutes.”
“Were you counting?”
“Yes.”
I laugh, but it breaks. I stand, wash my face, and open the door.
Matteo is far enough back that I don’t feel trapped. He takes one look at me and doesn’t say I look awful.
Again, restraint.
“I need a hand,” I say.
He holds his out immediately. Palm up. No question. No victory. Just there.
I put my hand in his. It’s warm and rough and steady.
It’s not Rocco’s. That matters. It should make me let go.
It does not.
For maybe ten seconds, I stand in a clinic hallway holding another man’s hand because my husband chose a fake video over my face and I’m very, very tired.
Matteo doesn’t squeeze until I do.
“Tiny rude feet,” I say, because I need the words outside my body.
“Probably yours.”
I gasp. “Excuse you.”
I let go of his hand before I can get used to it.
That’s also a kind of survival.
At the desk, I pay with my restored card. It works. The machine approves me with a cheerful beep, like it didn’t personally humiliate me yesterday.
I’m so sick of crying over banking infrastructure.
Outside, the rain has stopped. The pavement shines. Matteo opens the clinic door and waits while I step out.
There is a black car across the street.
I see it because Matteo sees it first. His whole body changes. His shoulders settle. His hand lowers near his coat. His eyes go flat.
“What?” I ask.
“Keep walking.”
Fear slides cold down my back.
“Rocco’s men?”
“Maybe. Could be Rafe’s.”
Fantastic. Love options.
We walk toward the corner. Not fast. Running makes people look.
Matteo’s phone buzzes. He reads it without stopping. A muscle jumps in his cheek.
“What is it?”
We turn the corner. He guides me without touching me, just his body between mine and the street.
“Rocco’s looking for you.”
My heart punches once. Hard.
I hate that my body knows his name before my brain can decide how to feel.
“How do you know?”
“A message came through an old channel. From one of his people.” He scans the street, then turns back to me. “They have an address.”
The envelope of scan photos bends in my hand.
I think of Rocco with maps and men and orders going down the chain, capo to soldier to driver, until they end at a woman with a hole in her borrowed leggings. The protected flat. The locked passport. The guards by the door.
Then I think of my card working. No conditions.
“Is he coming to take me back?”
Matteo’s face is careful. “The message says not to touch you.”
Not to touch me. My husband giving orders to men about my body because apparently we’re all learning consent at gunpoint now.
Instead I turn back toward the clinic. Toward the room where the baby’s heartbeat filled the air and Rocco wasn’t there to hear it.
“Do you want to move again?” Matteo asks.
His voice is even. But his eyes are tired.
He’ll do it. He’ll keep choosing the hard thing if I ask.
Rocco should have chosen me before there was proof. Before another man had to stand in a clinic hallway with his hand open.
My baby shifts inside me, small and alive.
“No,” I say.
“Serena,” Matteo says.
I look down the wet street.
Somewhere, Rocco is looking.
Good.
Let him look. Let him learn what it feels like to want me in front of him and not have the right to demand it. Let him come all the way to the door and find out I’m not a woman he can retrieve.
“Let him,” I say.