Chapter 17
LORETTA
My heart hammered against my ribs as I stepped into the house, the official hospital envelope clutched so tightly in my fingers that the edges had begun to crease beyond repair.
The late afternoon sun poured through the tall arched windows.
Everything felt too quiet.
Even my own footsteps sounded louder than usual as I crossed the entrance hall, each step echoing in a way that made my anxiety tighten further with every second.
Two months ago, Rafael and I had crossed a line we could never uncross.
That first night we had sex wasn’t gentle. It was raw, desperate, almost violent in its hunger—like a dam had finally burst inside both of us and there was no forcing the flood back.
We clawed at each other, breathless and shaking, every touch edged with months of unspoken need.
After that, there was no going back.
We became insatiable.
Rafael especially.
There were days he would pull me into him without warning, the control he wore so carefully around others dissolving the moment we were alone.
Sometimes it was in the quiet of the early morning, sometimes late at night when the house had gone still.
Sometimes he didn’t even bother speaking—just looked at me like restraint had become an insult he could no longer tolerate.
And I had let him.
Willingly.
Now everything had changed.
Because for the past two weeks, something had been wrong with my body.
At first, I told myself it was nothing.
Probably stress. Fatigue. The emotional chaos of everything between us finally catching up to me.
But the symptoms refused to be ignored.
The exhaustion came first—deep, bone-heavy, the kind that made even climbing the stairs feel like dragging myself through water.
Then the nausea, sudden and violent, striking without warning, especially in the mornings or whenever certain smells drifted too close.
Coffee had become unbearable. Even the scent of garlic made my stomach turn.
Then came the tenderness.
Subtle at first, then impossible to ignore.
My body reacting sharply to the smallest touch, even fabric brushing too roughly against my skin.
Dizziness followed soon after, moments where the world tilted just slightly and I had to steady myself against walls or furniture before anyone noticed.
And then—
The missed period.
Two weeks late.
That was when fear stopped being vague and started becoming shapeable.
Of course it made sense.
We had been reckless. Careless in the most irreversible way.
No protection. No discussion.
Nothing but instinct and heat and the assumption that consequences were something that happened to other people.
Not us.
And yet here I was.
Yesterday, I had bought the test in secret, my hands trembling so badly I almost dropped it twice in the pharmacy. I had taken it home, locked myself in the bathroom, and waited with a breath I didn’t realize I was holding.
Two pink lines had appeared almost immediately.
My heart had dropped so violently it felt like my entire body had gone hollow.
But even that wasn’t the worst part.
The worst part was not the result itself—but what it meant for him.
Rafael.
We had never once spoken about children.
Not casually. Not hypothetically. Not even in passing.
It was as if the subject simply did not exist in his world—or perhaps had been sealed away so tightly that neither of us dared open it.
And now...
I was carrying something that would force that door open whether we were ready or not.
This morning, I had gone to the hospital anyway.
I needed confirmation. I needed certainty.
Something solid enough that I wouldn’t be trapped in a spiral of ‘what ifs.’
That is why I have the blood tests done at the hospital this morning. The scans too.
They are far more reliable than a pharmacy test.
There was no doubt anymore.
I was pregnant.
The official report now sat in my hand—thin paper, printed words, medical confirmation that felt far heavier than anything physical should have the right to be.
Each line blurred slightly as I stared at it.
Our relationship had only begun to feel safe in the last few weeks.
Not perfect. But... real.
Rafael had changed in ways I hadn’t expected.
Or maybe I had simply stopped fighting what was already there.
Now, standing in the silence of the house, I dread the conversation that inevitably awaits me.
How am I supposed to tell him?
How do I look Rafael in the eye and tell him I might be carrying his child?
My grip tightens around the envelope.
A thousand terrible possibilities immediately begin to crowd my mind.
Would he be angry?
Would he blame me for it?
Would he look at me and see nothing but another complication in a life already drowning in grief?
Or worse—
Would he remind me that the only woman he ever imagined building a family with was Zara?
The thought makes my stomach twist.
Because for all the progress we’ve made, for all the walls that have fallen between us, there is still a part of me that cannot imagine Rafael welcoming this news.
Not when so much of him still seems trapped in a past he cannot let go of.
Not when Zara’s shadow still lingers in every corner of our marriage.
And yet another part of me—the foolish, hopeful part—cannot stop wondering what if.
What if he doesn’t look away?
What if he doesn’t reject it?
What if, for the first time, he sees a future instead of a ghost?
My fingers tightened slightly around the envelope again, crumpling it further without meaning to.
I forced myself to breathe, but the air felt heavier than it should have been.
I walked toward the study door.
Slower now..
And then I froze.
Because I heard voices.
The door was slightly ajar.
Ramiro.
“...did you notice Loretta is paler now than she used to be?” Ramiro said, his tone lower than usual. “And she’s been sick almost every morning. What if she’s pregnant? Have you even considered that?”
Silence.
Then the rustle of papers.
When Rafael finally spoke, his voice was calm.
“You’re making assumptions.”
Another pause.
“She lost a child before,” he said quietly. “The trauma from that... I don’t think she wants to go through it again. Even if she decided she did, she would’ve talked to me about it. Besides... do you honestly think I’d ever let Loretta carry my baby?”
The words slammed into me like a physical blow.
For a second, I didn’t even process them as sound.
It was as if my brain refused to translate what I had heard, as if understanding it would make it real in a way I couldn’t survive.
My body reacted first instead—my grip loosening, my fingers going numb one by one.
The envelope slipped free.
It fluttered to the floor in slow motion, like something insignificant.
But it’s significant.
Everything in me shattered in the same instant it touched the marble.
My chest caved inward with a sharp, suffocating pain that stole my breath completely. It wasn’t emotional pain alone—it was physical, as if something inside me had been crushed and couldn’t expand again.
I pressed a trembling hand to my mouth, trying to hold back the sound that rose anyway.
A broken, humiliating breath.
How could he say that?
How could Rafael say something like that so easily?
“Besides... do you honestly think I’d ever let Loretta carry my baby?”
The sentence replayed in my head again, louder this time. Stripped of context. Stripped of everything he had ever been to me.
As if I were nothing.
As if what was growing inside me meant nothing.
My vision blurred almost instantly.
Tears flooded so fast I didn’t even feel them forming.
One moment I was staring at the half-open door, the next everything had dissolved into distorted shapes and trembling light.
I bent slowly, almost mechanically, to pick up the fallen paper.
My hands were shaking so violently it took me twice to grasp it.
My fingers curled around the sheet as if holding it tighter could change what I had just heard.
But it didn’t. Nothing changed it.
Nothing softened it.
My throat tightened painfully.
This was the same man who had pulled me into his arms at night like I was something precious.
The same man who had looked at me like I mattered.
The same man who had whispered things into my skin that I had stupidly, desperately believed.
My mind began to betray me in fragments—memories I hadn’t asked for, surfacing like wounds reopening.
The night he flew across the country because I had casually mentioned loneliness, arriving without warning just to sit beside me like it was the most natural thing in the world.
The day he canceled a meeting that everyone said was impossible to cancel, simply because I had a migraine and he didn’t want me alone in pain.
And then—
The night he had been quieter than usual, sitting at the edge of the bed in the dark, admitting in a voice I barely recognized that I made him want to live again. Not just exist. Live.
All of it flashed through me like proof.
Like something I had misunderstood entirely.
My breath hitched.
It turns—it’s all a lie.
His heart has always belonged to Zara—and always will. That is why he cannot even imagine me having his child.
That’s why he can’t even imagine me carrying his child.
How foolish I’ve been.
The thought didn’t just hurt—it poisoned everything behind it.
A fresh wave of tears spilled down my face as I turned away from the study door.
My legs felt heavy, disconnected, like they didn’t belong to me anymore.
Each step away from that door felt like stepping out of something I had built my entire world around.
I had been so sure.
So foolishly, dangerously sure.
I thought I had found something real in him.
Something different from everything else I had known.
I had even stopped pressing him about the secret that bound him so unnaturally to Zara, after he once said he might tell me.
I convinced myself we could simply live around it.
That, with time, he would move on. That Zara would become nothing more than a memory instead of something he still seemed to worship.
I was wrong.
I miscalculated everything.