Page 27 of Pregnant By A Rich Demon 4

I got in my car and sped home before I did something reckless like go over to Amai’s house.

I kept the ultrasound picture in the inside pocket of my jacket, and over the following days, I found myself taking it out more than I wanted to admit—not to grieve, exactly, though grief was in there somewhere underneath everything else. I took it out because looking at that gray smear of a shape, that one small flutter of a heartbeat rendered in black and white, reminded me of something that Winston’s casual comment about Sunday dinner had almost made me forget.

That baby was mine. Whatever else had happened, whatever Amai got to keep, that connection—the biological fact of a child I’d fathered—didn’t disappear just because the doctor said only one heartbeat remained. I started to think about it differently as the days passed. Not my son is gone. More like, my son didn’t disappear. Part of him is still inside his sister.

The thought settled into me slowly, the way cold water finds every low place in a room. It made a kind of sense that felt truer every time I turned it over. Twins share everything in the womb—blood, nutrients, the same tight space, the same heartbeat rhythm for months. Whatever passed between them that I didn’t fully understand.

Which meant she wasn’t only Amai’s daughter anymore. Not really. Not completely.

I went to the boat more than I needed to that week. I told myself it was oversight, that a project this size required a man’s presence to keep contractors honest, but the truth was I liked being there. I liked walking those finished hallways and feeling, for a few hours, like the future I’d planned was still intact somewhere, even if the present had gotten complicated.

During the first visit, I found Delacroix arguing with an electrician over a panel that hadn’t been wired to spec. The two of them were hunched over a schematic spread across a sawhorse table, voices raised just enough to echo down the hallway. Delacroix straightened when he saw me, wiped his hand on his jeans before offering it, and walked me through the punch list like a man presenting evidence in his own defense.

“Nursery’s basically done,” he said. “Crib’s in, changing stations mounted. We finished the accent wall Thursday. Kitchen’s ahead of schedule—cabinets came in early, if you can believe that. First time a supplier’s ever beaten a deadline in my thirty years doing this.”

I let the small talk wash past me and walked through. Something about the room’s proportions caught me off guard the way they hadn’t before. It had been designed for two—the space, the flow, the exact placement of the second crib against the far wall where morning light would have hit it first. Now, there was only one crib standing where two used to be planned, and the empty stretch of floor beside it looked less like open space and more like an absence with a shape.

“You want us to close that gap?” Delacroix asked, following my gaze. “Move the crib toward the wall, fill it in with a rocking chair or something? Room reads a little unbalanced right now, if I’m being honest. Client walking through might ask questions.”

“No,” I said. “Leave it.”

He didn’t ask why. Men like Delacroix had learned not to ask me why about anything.

The second crib—the one that would have belonged to my son—had already been disassembled, but when I found it in the storage room below deck, back boxed, still labeled with the manufacturer’s sticker, something in my heart refused the idea of it being hauled off with the construction debris. I told the crew to keep it. Store it properly, wrapped, dry, protected from the damp that sometimes crept in through the hull seams.

“You want it kept?” one of the younger workers asked, already halfway toward loading it onto a dolly headed for the dumpster before I stopped him.

“I want it kept,” I said.

Something in my voice must have carried a warning because he didn’t push back, just wheeled it toward the storage closet instead and stacked boxes around it like he was tucking it in.

I stood there for a minute after he left. It wasn’t superstition, exactly, keeping something I might never use. It was closer to refusal. Throwing it away would have been agreeing that my son had simply ceased to matter, that his absence required no monument, no evidence he’d ever been real. I wasn’t willing to agree to that.

Three days later, I went back a second time, later in the evening than I usually came, when most of the crew had cleared out and only the security detail remained, walking their slow loops around the perimeter deck. The nursery had progressed further—a mobile hung now above the single crib, wooden stars and moons turning slow on fishing line, catching the last of the light through the reinforced windows. Sometimes I caught myself imagining both babies in there.

It wasn’t healthy, imagining that. I knew that even as I did it. But there was a difference, I told myself, between indulging a fantasy and believing it—between mourning what should have been and mistaking it for what still could be. I stood there long enough that the security detail’s radio chirped somewhere below deck, someone checking in, the ordinary rhythm of a job that had nothing to do with grief.

Before I left that night, I opened the storage closet and checked on the boxed crib, running my hand along the cardboard edge the way you’d check on someone sleeping, just to confirm they were still there. Foolish. I knew it was foolish even as I did it. But foolish felt better than empty.

The third visit was different—shorter, more purposeful, though I told myself the purpose was still construction oversight, even as I walked straight past the kitchen crew and the electricians without stopping to check their work. I went to the room that used to be the casino’s surveillance office, where the framing for the private lab had finally closed in, drywall up, the cold-storage unit installed and humming for the first time when I flipped the breaker myself.

I stood there for a long moment, listening to it run, that low mechanical hum filling a room that had been silent for months. Something in me settled the way water settles once it finds its level. This was progress I hadn’t announced to Delacroix or the crew, hadn’t put on any official punch list. A room within a room, its purpose known only to me.

The private lab was the last stop on that visit, tucked into what used to be the casino’s old surveillance room, retrofitted now with cold storage, a small centrifuge, and sealed sample containers stacked neat on steel shelving. I’d had it built quietly, off the main construction manifest, because a man in my position learned to build contingencies the way other men saved money—automatically, without needing to justify it to anyone, including himself.

Standing in there, surrounded by equipment that hummed low and steady, I felt something close to calm for the first time in days. Whatever came next—whatever Amai tried to manipulate, whatever lab results got quietly altered by men on his payroll, because I didn’t trust for one second that a Landry-adjacent clinic hadn’t already proven itself capable of exactly that kind of corruption—I would have my own answers. My own proof. Something nobody could take from me or lie to me about.

I locked the door behind me and went back up to the nursery one more time before I left. As I stood in the doorway, looking at the single crib, I thought, this is still a home. Whatever it looks like right now, whatever’s missing, it’s still a home for our baby.

Mine and Truth’s. Not Amai’s alone. Never just his.

I left with a heart full of hope now that my plan was tangible. Everything I wanted was in my reach, and Amai was so busy with Rahsaan that he’d never see it coming.

I stopped by the war room the next afternoon, mostly out of habit—the kind of habit that outlives the reason for it, a groove worn into you by years of showing up in the same places at the same hours because that’s what you did when you were building something with your brother instead of against him. I told myself I was checking on the Rahsaan situation, that a man in my position needed to stay current on operations, even from the periphery of them. That was mostly true. It just wasn’t the whole truth.

Amai was there alone, which almost never happened anymore. He had his back to the door, shirt sleeves rolled, knuckles split open on his right hand in a way that told me exactly where he’d been and what he’d done there without needing him to say it. There was a shallow cut along his jaw, too, already scabbing, the kind of wound that comes from a fight that got closer than planned. It was exactly like the one my dad had. A whiteboard behind him still carried half-erased names, arrows connecting one to another. The architecture of a war I only understood in outline.

“You look like shit,” I said.