Page 81 of Pregnant By A Rich Demon 4

I’d said that. I remembered saying that, remembered the flash of anger underneath the calm I was working so hard to maintain, and I remembered Amai’s arm coming out flat against my chest like I was something dangerous that needed containing. The audacity of that nigga to treat me like the threat!

You can see her from where you’re standing. That’s what you get.

That’s what you get. Like I was a stranger. Like I hadn’t spent nine months building a nursery with my own hands, hadn’t bought a crib and a dresser and enough soft gray patterned bedding to outfit a whole daycare, hadn’t lain awake more nights than I could count imagining the exact weight of a small body against my chest.

And then the slip.

There was no way I would’ve missed my⁠—

I stopped there in my own memory the way I’d stopped in the doorway, feeling the sentence squeeze my throat, forcing it back down into my gut. My—daughter. That’s what I’d almost said, and it wasn’t a slip in the way people mean when they say a slip of the tongue, some accident of grammar that means nothing. It came from somewhere true. Somewhere underneath the part of my brain that knew the DNA results, that knew Amai’s blood and not mine ran through that baby’s veins. The part of me that had built the crib, bought the elephant-and-cloud sheets, spent nine months believing—no, deciding—that she belonged to me in every way that mattered beyond a lab report.

I’d covered it fast. Slip of the tongue. Long day. Didn’t mean anything by it.

But I did mean something by it. I meant everything by it. And the fact that I had to swallow that truth back down and dress it up as exhaustion told me something important: this family, this house, this version of fatherhood Amai had built for himself off the back of a stolen procedure and a manipulated contract—none of it left room for what was actually true. It only left room for what the paperwork said.

Paperwork lies. Paperwork gets manufactured by men with money and motive. I knew that better than anyone, because it was my own father’s fertility clinic that had put two different men’s contributions into the same woman without her knowledge. And if a system that corrupt could produce a document calling one man a father and the other a stranger, then the document wasn’t worth the ink used to print it.

I stayed on that thought until the ache of it settled into something quieter, and then I moved forward in the memory to the part that mattered most.

I just wanted to at least be an uncle. Since I didn’t get to be a dad today.

I’d chosen those words carefully. I want to be honest with myself about that too, sitting alone in a parking garage with nobody around to perform for. I’d known, walking up those hospital stairs, that Truth would be raw. New mothers are raw—hormonal, exhausted, stripped down to something more honest than they usually let themselves be. I’d known that grief lands different on a woman who just watched her own body do something miraculous and terrible in the same twelve hours. I’d known that if I framed my loss the right way—humble, small, not a single demand attached to it—it would land somewhere soft in her, somewhere she couldn’t easily defend.

That’s not manipulation. That’s understanding people. There’s a difference, even if Amai’s world doesn’t know how to see it.

And it worked. It worked exactly the way I’d calculated it would.

You are one, she’d said. You’re her uncle. That’s real, Kaisen.

I opened my eyes and looked up at the concrete ceiling of the parking garage. I let those four words sit in my chest the way you let good news sit before you start planning what to do with it.

You are one.

She said it with feeling. I remembered the crack in her voice when she said it, that small break that told me she meant it all the way down, that this wasn’t a woman being polite to a grieving man for the sake of getting him out the door faster. This was recognition. This was Truth Renois looking at me, after everything—after the sperm swap, after the shooting, after the war that had swallowed three months of both our lives—and telling me, plainly, that I was something to that child.

You are one.

The second half of what she said didn’t need to live in the same space as the first half. You’re her uncle—that was the label, the word she was required to use given what the paperwork said, given the world she was living in with Amai standing three feet away, listening to every word. But you are one was the truth underneath the label, the thing she actually believed when she wasn’t performing for an audience of one very dangerous man.

People say what they’re supposed to say all the time. That doesn’t mean it’s what they mean.

I sat with that for a long moment, letting it fill my soul that had been hollow since the ultrasound, and then I turned my attention back to the feed, because the audio had shifted. Amai’s voice, low and rough, came through the speaker.

“He does,” Truth said. Tired. Her voice had that particular flatness that comes after a long labor and delivery, a voice worn all the way down to its foundation.

“You good?” Amai asked her.

“I’m alright.” A pause, the soft crinkle of something—fabric, maybe, or the wrapper on that stuffed bear I’d given her. “That was weird as hell, though. Right? I’m not making that up?”

“You ain’t making shit up. Man walked in here with enough balloons to float this whole building off the foundation.”

I sat forward slightly, elbows on the wheel, listening close now.

“He almost called her his daughter.”

“I heard him.”

“You think he meant it? Like actually meant it, not just tired-and-said-the-wrong-word meant it?”