“I can’t decide anything until I know,” I hear myself whisper.
Z’s hand tightens on mine. “Know what?”
“Whose it is.” The truth tastes like ash. “I need to know who the father is before I can decide what to do.”
Something flickers across his face—hurt, jealousy, maybe anger—but he buries it fast. “Okay.”
I feel like a monster.
“Z—”
“I said okay.” He stands up and runs a hand through his dark hair. “How much does the paternity test cost?”
I’ve already looked it up. Obsessively. Multiple times. “Fifteen hundred dollars. For the non-invasive kind. They can do it around eight weeks.”
I’m at ten weeks now. Much longer, and there’s no decision to be made at all.
Z doesn’t flinch at the cost even though I can see him calculating in his head—that’s everything we’ve saved for a deposit on our own place.
“Then we do it,” he says finally. “You need to know. I get it.”
“Z—”
“Don’t.” The word comes out sharper than he intends, and he immediately softens it. “Don’t apologize, Harp. You didn’t ask for any of this. Neither of us did.”
But the set of his shoulders as he grabs his gaming headphones tells me everything he’s not saying. That it fucking kills him. That he’s been waiting his whole life for me and even now—even pregnant with what might be his baby—I still can’t fully give myself to him.
Because part of me is still trapped in Dallas, back with Caleb in those golden moments before everything shattered.
The blood drawtakes less than five minutes.
Z’s cheek swab takes even less.
It’s seven to ten business days for results, the kindly nurse tells us. As if those words—business days—somehow make the waiting easier. As if I can just go about my life while this answer grows inside me, dividing and multiplying, becoming more real with every hour that passes.
Z holds my hand in the clinic. We pay together with the cash we’ve been saving. Z puts in more than I can contribute—crumpled bills that represent hours of his life standing over a hot grill, chopping vegetables, and cleaning grease traps.
“Thank you,” I whisper when we’re back outside in the Austin heat.
He just nods and doesn’t meet my eyes.
We don’t talk about it after that. We go to work. Come home. Collapse into bed, exhausted but not touching beyond the inevitable press of bodies on a mattress meant for one person.
I check my email every thirty seconds when it’s my turn to use the one phone we still share between us.
Refresh. Nothing.
Refresh. Nothing.
Refresh. Refresh. Refresh.
Z notices. Of course he notices.
But he doesn’t say anything—he just throws himself into his gaming in the hour or two he allows himself before bed. I see code on the screen sometimes when I glance over. He’s teaching himself programming in what little free time he has, watching YouTube tutorials and scribbling notes in a composition notebook.
“You’re good at that,” I tell him one night, nodding at the monitor.
He shrugs. “Just messing around.”