Chapter 4
Evelyn POV
Bryce's fingers were still wrapped around my wrist when I said it again.
"Let go of me."
He didn't.
"You can't walk out of here and go straight to your father," he said, his voice low, almost reasonable. "Not like this. Not while you're this upset. You'll say things you can't take back."
"I'm going to say exactly what happened." I kept my voice level. "I'm going to tell him I came here to show you your baby's ultrasound and found your hands on my sister."
"Evelyn." There was a warning in the way he said my name, soft but unmistakable. "Think about what you're doing."
"I am thinking. Very clearly." I looked down at his hand on my wrist, at the pressure of his fingers against my pulse point, and I felt something cold and deliberate settle in my chest. "I'm going to my father's house. I'm going to tell him the truth. And you are going to let go of my arm."
Bryce held on for one more second. Then his jaw worked slightly.
The ultrasound photo slipped from my other hand. It spun down two stairs before coming to rest face-up on the landing, my baby's curved spine visible in gray and white against the floor.
Neither of us moved to pick it up.
Behind Bryce, Sophia had moved to stand near the hallway entrance, close enough to the door that the passage was barely wide enough for one person.
Her face had settled into a look of practiced concern — the expression she always reached for when she wanted to seem like the reasonable one.
"There's no reason to make this worse," she said, her voice pitched to carry just far enough. "Nobody needs to get hurt."
I looked at her for one moment — at the deliberate placement of her body, at the hand still resting against her flat stomach — and then I turned back to Bryce.
"I'm leaving," I said. "Now."
He released my wrist.
The release was so abrupt that I took a half-step to steady myself, and I felt the imprint of his fingers still radiating warmth against my pulse even after the contact was gone.
I didn't look down at my wrist. I turned toward the door.
Sophia shifted sideways into the gap between the doorframe and the stairwell wall, her chin lifted, her expression still arranged into that look of practiced concern.
"Evelyn, please don't do this," she said. "You're not thinking about the baby."
I reached her and put my hand on her arm — not hard, just enough to move her — and pushed gently but firmly to the side.
She stumbled, one foot catching against the other, and she fell back a step toward where Bryce was standing, her shoulder grazing his arm.
He moved immediately.
I heard him cross the space behind me, and then his palm hit my shoulder. The force knocked me backward.
My heel caught the edge of the top step, and I grabbed for the railing and found nothing.
My other hand dropped instinctively to cover my belly, and then the step disappeared beneath me, and I was falling.
My shoulder blade hit the edge of a step first, and the impact sent a white flash across my vision. Then my back.
Then something struck my abdomen — not a clean pain but a deep, wrong pressure, the kind that made my whole body understand before my mind caught up.
The railing and the white wall spun past me, and I heard a sound come out of my own throat that I didn't recognize, and then the lower landing came up hard, and everything stopped.
I couldn't breathe. My lungs wouldn't fill. I lay still and stared at the ceiling and listened to the fluorescent light hum above me while the pain in my abdomen sharpened from impact into something that pulsed and didn't fade.
Then I felt warmth spreading at my legs. I looked down. Against the pale fabric of my dress, a dark stain was growing outward from beneath the hem, slow and steady.
I pressed my hand against my stomach. I could not feel him move.
"Baby," I said, and the word came out broken and barely audible, more breath than sound. "Baby, please."
The pain sharpened again, and I curled slightly inward around it, my hand pressing harder, as though pressure alone could mean something, as though I could hold the situation in place by holding on.
Footsteps on the stairs above me. I heard them stop.
I made myself look up.
Bryce was still on the stairs, three or four steps from the bottom. The composure he'd held through everything was gone. His face was white. His eyes moved from me to the blood on the floor, then back up to something behind him.
He did not come down.
I watched his right foot shift forward onto the next step, and then stop.
"Bryce." My voice was a thread, barely enough to carry the distance between us, but I held his gaze, and I said it as clearly as I could. "Please. Save our baby."
He flinched.
"Call an ambulance," I said, and my voice broke apart on the last syllable.
He still didn't move. His eyes were wide and glassy, still tracking between me and the blood and Sophia above him.
What I saw in them wasn't cruelty or calculation — it was shock, plain and complete, the kind that empties a person.
The pain contracted again, sudden and absolute, and I curled around it and stopped trying to read his face.
I pressed both hands against my belly, and I thought about the ultrasound from this morning — the curve of my baby's spine, the shadow of his hands, the technician saying he was very active today.
There was only this. Only the small life I was trying to keep inside my body by force of will alone.
"Baby," I whispered. "Hold on."
Then, louder than I thought I could manage: "Please call an ambulance. Save my baby."
The light above the stairwell hummed once, and then the sound of it, and the sound of everything else, went away.
