I moved quietly, not wanting to wake him—not ready to have this conversation until I knew exactly what we were talking about.
The house was quiet as I made my way downstairs—just the distant creak of the kitchen door, the occasional clatter of a pot or pan, the sound of someone moving through their morning routine without needing to be conscious of each step.
I found Jojo at the kitchen table with a cup of tea and a notebook, making what looked like a grocery list. He looked up when I came in, did a quick assessment of my face, and then set his pen down with the care of someone who’d noticed something important.
“You okay?” he asked, voice neutral in a way that spoke of practice rather than calm.
I opened my mouth to say yes, the word already formed, and then stopped. Jojo was the person on this ranch who knew where everything was and handled anything without making it a production.
“No,” I said, the word coming out with more breath than voice. “I think I might need—“
Jojo was already moving, pushing back from the table with a quick, economical motion. “Come on,” he said, already crossing to the pantry door. “I’ll show you where they are.”
He led me to the small room off the kitchen, reached up to a high shelf I wouldn’t have been able to reach, and pulled down a small box with a blue and white logo I recognized from my nursing rotation in family medicine.
“We keep backups around here,” he said, handing it over without ceremony. “Burke and Danny used the last one a few months ago when Brandon was just a rumor. I meant to pick upmore, but—“ He shrugged, the simple acceptance of a man who’d learned that some things didn’t need to be perfect to work.
The practicality of it—the sheer matter-of-fact logic of a household full of alphas and omegas keeping pregnancy tests stocked like extra batteries—cut through some of the panic rising in my throat. I took the box with hands that weren’t quite steady and turned back toward the bathroom without another word.
Jojo let me go without comment, already reaching for his tea, already turning back to his notebook like what had just happened was both completely ordinary and entirely my business.
The test was the same as the ones I’d handed out a thousand times in the hospital—the kind with the plastic stick and the little window that would either show one line or two.
I read the instructions even though I’d walked patients through them a hundred times, set the box on the edge of the sink, and then sat on the closed toilet to wait out the ten minutes it would take for an answer.
Ten minutes. Enough time to run through every scenario, every possibility, every way this could go. Decker, who’d been a SEAL for eight years and a security consultant after discharge. Decker, who’d taken down Gerald’s man with two strikes and a knee to the ribs. Decker, who’d looked at me in the dark and said “stay” with the weight of a man who meant exactly what he was saying.
Decker, who had never once mentioned children or the future or anything beyond the next day, the next week, or the problem of Gerald and what to do about him.
When the timer on my phone finally went off, I picked up the stick with hands that weren’t quite steady and looked at the little window.
Two pink lines. Not ambiguous, not faint, not the kind of result that required a follow-up test or a doctor’s confirmation. Just two clear, definitive lines that said: pregnant.
I put the test on the edge of the sink and sat with it for a long moment, trying to make sense of what I was seeing. I was going to be a parent.
I, who had spent years caring for other people’s newborns in a controlled clinical environment where at the end of every shift someone else took the baby home.
I, who had never changed a diaper on my own, who had never gotten up at three in the morning for anything but a hospital shift, who had never thought beyond the next week because the future had stopped being a place I could count on since Nebraska.
With Decker. Who I had known for a matter of weeks. Who had been a stranger to me a month ago, who had pulled me out of a side yard in Nebraska with my split lip and bruised ribs.
The shock wasn’t a single feeling; it was a pile of feelings that had all arrived at once and were blocking the doorway. I didn’t know whether to cry or laugh or sit down on the bathroom floor. My hands were still shaking, my heart still hammering in my throat, the taste of bile still sour on my tongue.
I picked up the test again, turned it over in my hands like it might show me something different if I looked at it from another angle. The lines remained—solid, definitive, not changing no matter how I held it.
I was still holding it when I walked back into the kitchen—stick in one hand, the empty box in the other, face set in lines I couldn’t feel but knew were there.
Jojo looked up from his notebook, did another quick assessment of my face, and then nodded once—a short, definitive movement that carried more weight than its single syllable should have been able to.
“Congratulations?” he said, making it a question rather than a statement.
I opened my mouth to respond—to say thank you or I don’t know or something that would make sense of the chaos happening in my chest—and then stopped.
Because Decker was standing in the kitchen doorway, eyes doing a quick read of the room—me in the middle of the floor with the test in my hand, Jojo at the table with his notebook, the moment hanging in the air between us.
He looked at my face. He looked at the stick in my hand. He looked back at my face.
Neither of us moved for a long beat—the pause of a thing changing without permission, a line being crossed that couldn’t be uncrossed.
