Chapter 2 Forty-Eight Hours to Know
Olivia POV
I press the elevator button twice, like urgency might make the car arrive faster, like there's anywhere fast enough.
The doors open. I step inside. I press the button for the lobby, and the second the doors slide shut and seal me into that small mirrored box, alone, the thing I've been holding by main force since the doorway simply gives out.
It doesn't come gently.
My knees go first, my back sliding down the mirrored wall until I'm crouched in the corner of the car with my arms wrapped around myself, and the sound that comes out of me isn't crying, not at first — it's closer to something being torn, low and guttural, a sound I don't recognize as mine because I have never once let myself make it out loud, not in five years, not through every quiet cruelty that came before this one. My hand claps over my mouth too late to stop it, and I rock forward over my own knees, shaking so hard my teeth click together.
I see her face when I close my eyes. Not his. Hers — calm, pleased, unbothered, like I was the intrusion. Maybe you should go. Said the way you'd say it to a housekeeper who walked in at the wrong moment. Not to a wife. Not to the woman who's spent five years lying on tables with her feet in stirrups so that a marriage that never once loved her back could have an heir.
I press the heel of my hand against my sternum like I can hold my own ribs together from the outside, and I cry the way I haven't let myself cry since I was a girl — ugly, wrecked, no rhythm to it, my whole body shuddering with each breath I can't quite finish taking. The elevator hums around me, indifferent, floor numbers ticking down one at a time, and I let it happen because there is no one in this small mirrored room to perform composure for. Just me, and my own reflection multiplied on every wall, watching a woman come apart in real time from every angle at once.
It doesn't last long. It can't. By the time the numbers reach three, some old, trained instinct claws its way back up through the wreckage —not in the lobby, not in front of anyone, hold it, hold it— and I drag myself up the mirrored wall by inches, wipe my face hard with both hands, and force air into my lungs in four measured pulls, the way I taught myself years ago in exactly this kind of small enclosed silence.
By the time the doors open onto the lobby, my face is doing its old, familiar work again — swollen-eyed but composed, chin level, nothing that would make a stranger look twice.
Nobody does look twice. Skeleton crew moving under wrapped chandeliers, too busy to notice a woman walking fast for the door.
I make it through the revolving door into cold air that hits my wet lashes like something physical. I make it to the car.
My phone is ringing by the time I reach the lobby. Lumen Fertility. I watch the screen light up, watch it ring itself out, and I don't answer.
It rings a second time before I've even reached the garage. I don't answer that one either.
I sit in the driver's seat, hands still trembling in my lap, and tell myself the same thing I told myself three hours ago, getting dressed for a morning I thought I already understood.
Today will be different.
I have no idea yet how right I am.
—-
I give myself until the parking garage. Not one second sooner.
I don't remember the four blocks back to the clinic — just my hands on the wheel, white-knuckled, some steadier version of me driving while the rest of me sits very still and refuses to think. I breathe in fours, the way I taught myself years ago, and shove the sob still sitting raw in my chest back down where it came from. Not here. Not in front of her.
Somehow I'm back in the same chair I sat in an hour ago, spine straight, hands folded to hide the shaking. I stare at the door until Dr. Nazari comes through it, tablet held to her chest like a shield.
She looks at the empty seat beside me before she looks at me.
"He's not coming," I say, before she can ask — and I'm almost proud of how steady it sounds. Almost.
"That's all right." She sits across from me, voice even, the kind of even that's been practiced on a hundred women in this exact chair. "I see this more than you'd think, Olivia. IVF is hard on partners in different ways. There's no version of this that's easy for anybody."
I almost laugh. The sound gets as far as my throat and dies there. It isn't IVF that kept him away this morning. It's a walnut table on the ninth floor and a woman's spine arching against a pillow like she owned the whole room, like she owned him, and some part of me wants to tell Dr. Nazari exactly what kept my husband away, just to watch her practiced kindness falter for once. I don't.
"Is there a version where he's actually here?" I ask anyway, because some habit of performing normalcy is apparently the last thing to go, even now, even with my whole marriage still wet on my shoes.
She almost smiles, the way you smile at a question you're not allowed to answer honestly. "The bloodwork from the transfer needs another forty-eight hours before I can give you anything solid," she says, tapping something into the tablet without looking at it. "I'll call you personally the second the lab confirms it, either way. You won't hear it from a nurse, you won't hear it from a form letter. You'll hear it from me."
"Forty-eight hours," I repeat, like saying it slower will make it smaller. Like I can shrink it down to something that fits in my chest instead of something that's already too big for the room.
"Forty-eight hours." She sets the tablet down and actually looks at me now, really looks, the way no one in my life has looked at me in longer than I want to admit. Not Damian. Not my father. Nobody has looked at me like I was a whole person with a face worth reading in longer than I can remember, and it undoes something in me that the affair itself hadn't quite managed to reach. "Go home. Rest. And Olivia — whatever's keeping your husband away today, I hope it's worth it."
I go still for a moment, my eyes filling with tears. I almost cry right there in the chair. All I manage to say is, "Thank you, Dr. Nazari."
