Two months since that drunken night with Cale McCabe, and the morning sickness has stopped being a surprise. You sit on the edge of your bed with the phone face-up in your lap, the photo of the positive test still glowing on the screen — the one you sent him an hour ago, on an impulse you have already stopped regretting. The apartment is quiet except for the old radiator ticking under the window and your own heartbeat doing something louder.

Then the footsteps. Heavy, quick, the sound of boots taking your stairs two at a time. They stop at your door, and the knock that follows is not a knock — it is a fist, four hard strikes, and the chain rattles in its track.

His voice comes through the wood low and flat, the same voice that has mocked you from a motorcycle for three years.

A pause. Then, quieter, the tone he uses when he is done pretending.

You do not move, and the silence stretches. From the other side of the door you hear leather, the creak of him shifting his weight, the small clink of his earring when he turns his head to check the hall. Your phone buzzes — his name, and beneath it a text you did not send: "It's not what you think." The lie arrives before he does.

The knock comes again, once, softer, and his voice drops to something tired and almost careful, a voice you have not heard him use.