Page 5 of Pregnant By A Rich Demon 4

“It won’t.”

“I know.” I said it anyway, and I think he understood that some part of the looking wasn’t about hoping. It was about proving that the thing we lost had actually, definitely, once existed.

He set the phone face-down on his knee, finally, like the light of it had gotten to be too much. His jaw worked once, and I watched him decide something.

“I claimed him,” he said. “In my head. Before we knew whose he was. I already had him.”

I didn’t say anything. I’d learned in the last few months that some sentences needed room to finish themselves.

“I knew there was a chance he wasn’t mine,” Amai went on. “I knew it the whole time you were carrying both of them. And it didn’t matter. I had a son. Both of them were mine the second I saw them on that screen the first time. I didn’t split it up in my head—this one’s blood, this one’s not. I don’t know how to explain that to you without it sounding like something I’m saying to look good.”

“It doesn’t sound like that.”

He looked at me like he was waiting for the rest of the sentence, the part where I told him what it did sound like instead.

“She’s mine,” he said, and his voice thinned out on the word, went someplace rougher than I usually heard from him. “Biologically. The one that’s still—the one that’s still here. And he was Kaisen’s, and he’s the one who’s gone, and I can’t—” He stopped. Started again. “I feel like I won something I didn’t want to win.”

There it was. The thing underneath the thing.

“I look at her on the screen now,” he said, “and I’m grateful. I am. God, I’m grateful. And in the same breath, I feel like a piece of shit for being grateful, because being grateful feels like being glad it was his and not mine. Like some part of me is keeping score, even when I don’t want to be keeping score.” He rubbed a hand down his face. “I don’t know how to hold both of those without it turning into something ugly.”

“It’s not ugly,” I said. “It’s just true.”

He looked at me, waiting, the way he used to wait for me to flinch first in an argument. I didn’t flinch. I’d had my own version of this conversation with myself to know the shape of it cold.

“Stop making everything between you and Kaisen a fucking competition. This ain’t that,” I said. “I know that’s how everything between you two works. I know that’s the language you were raised speaking—somebody wins, somebody loses, somebody’s got something the other one doesn’t. But this isn’t that. Kaisen losing his son doesn’t mean you have to apologize for having a daughter who’s still alive. And her being alive doesn’t make what happened to him any less of a loss. They’re not on a scale, Amai. One of them living doesn’t cancel the other one out.”

“Feels like it should,” he said quietly.

“I know it feels like that. That’s the lie grief tells you when it’s got nothing else to work with. It wants a reason. It wants somebody to blame, somebody to credit, some math that makes it make sense. There isn’t any math. There’s just what happened, and it’s not fair, and nobody did anything to deserve it—not you, not Kaisen, not her.”

He was quiet for a long moment. Not the shut-down quiet. The other kind, the kind where I could tell something was actually landing.

“I keep thinking,” he said, “that if I let myself be happy about her, I’m saying his life mattered less.”

“You can love her with your whole chest and still grieve him,” I said. “I’m doing both right now. Same day. Same hour, sometimes. I feel guilty that I’m not falling apart every second for him, and then I feel guilty for being relieved she’s healthy, and then I feel guilty for feeling relieved because it seems like I’m choosing. I’m not choosing. I don’t think there’s a choosing to be done. I think you just carry all of it at the same time, and you don’t get to set any of it down early.”

He reached over and took my hand, turned it over in his, like he was looking for something written on my palm.

“I don’t know how to grieve somebody who was never fully mine to begin with,” he said.

“You don’t have to know how. You just have to let yourself do it without deciding first whether you’ve earned it.” I squeezed his hand. “You don’t need permission to be sad about him, Amai. Nobody’s handing out points for who’s allowed the most grief in this family.”

He looked down at the phone again, screen dark now, and turned it over slowly, like he was giving himself one more look before he put it away for the night.

“She’s not a prize,” he said, testing the words out loud, like he needed to hear himself say them to believe them. “And he wasn’t a loss I get to feel good about surviving.”

“No,” I said. “He was just here. For a little while. That’s all he needed to be.”

Something moved through his face then—not relief, exactly. Something closer to permission. He set the phone on the floor beside the chair, face-down, done with it for the night, and pulled me down into his lap instead, carefully, like he was asking without asking.

I let him. I put my head against his chest and felt his heartbeat, and thought about how strange it was that we were both grieving the same boy from two different distances—him as a father who’d claimed a child who wasn’t his, and me as the mother who’d carried him and felt him disappear from the inside. Neither of us had the right words for it. We didn’t need the right words. We just needed to sit in the dark room together and let it be true.

“I’m sorry,” he said after a while, into my hair.

“For what?”

“I don’t know yet. Just sorry.”