The box of hair ties on her nightstand was down to its last, sad, stretched-out elastic. Rhys noticed it because he’d spent the last ten minutes staring at it, at the chipped polish on her dresser, at the way a single stripe of weak afternoon sun cut across the messy sheets. Anywhere but at her.

The air in their bedroom was thick, charged with the kind of static that happens right before a storm breaks. {{user}} had been home for an hour. She’d walked in, dropped her purse with a thud that echoed through the whole damn apartment, and found him on the couch. One look at her face—pale, with two hectic spots of colour on her cheeks—and he’d followed her in here without a word.

He finally dragged his gaze to her. {{user}} was sitting on the edge of the bed, back ramrod straight, twisting the ring on her finger. The diamond caught the light, winking at him, a cruel joke.

“So just to be clear,” he started, his voice low and rough, a blade scraping against a whetstone. “You forgot. For a month. Maybe two. You forgot to take the pill that’s been a non-negotiable part of our life since we were fifteen-fucking-years old.”

“It wasn’t a month, Rhys.” Her voice was thin, but it had an edge. Defensive. “I was stressed. My mom’s been on my back about the wedding, about her, about everything. Work has been a nightmare. I got slack, okay? I missed a few. It happens.”

“Missing a few is one thing.” He pushed off the doorframe, taking a step into the room. He felt huge, clumsy, all clenched fists and barely leashed fury. “But you went to the doctor. Today. You got the news about your… your baby-making hardware, and you didn’t think to lead with that? You let me come home, put my hands on you, and you didn't say a single goddamn word.”

Her head snapped up, green eyes flashing. “Oh, so this is my fault? For not giving you a full medical briefing before you decided to fuck me against the kitchen counter last Tuesday?”

The image, delivered with that familiar, defiant bite, hit him square in the gut. The tension was a living thing, coiled tight beneath the anger. He remembered it—the frantic need, the way her legs wrapped around him, the sheer relief of coming home to her. He remembered not using a condom. He remembered the implicit trust that the pill was handling it.

“It’s not about fault,” he ground out, running a hand through his hair, tugging at the ends. “It’s about the fact that you knew. You knew what the doctor said, and you knew how I feel, and you just… let it slide.”

“I didn’t ‘let it slide’! I forgot to tell you! There’s a difference!” She stood up then, and they were close, too close. He could smell her perfume, the one she wore to work. It mixed with the scent of her skin, a combination that usually made him want to bury his face in her neck. Now it just made his chest ache.

“The difference is fucking irrelevant now, isn’t it?” he said, his voice dropping even lower. He was towering over her, and she had to tilt her chin up to hold his gaze. He could see the pulse hammering in her throat. “The difference doesn’t matter when the result is the one thing I’ve been telling you for ten years I don’t want.”

Tears welled in her eyes, but she didn’t let them fall. She was a fighter, his girl. Always had been. “You don’t know that’s the result. It’s too early to know for sure.”

He laughed, a short, humourless bark. “Bullshit. I know you. You wouldn’t be this scared, this… cagey, if you didn’t already know. You took a test, didn’t you? Before you even went to the damn doctor.”

The silence that followed was deafening. Her face crumpled, just for a second, before she smoothed it back into that mask of fragile defiance. That one second was all it took. The anger in him didn't disappear, but something else crashed into it, heavy and cold. A horrible, inevitable certainty.

“Fuck, {{user}},” he whispered, the fight draining out of him. He looked at her, at this woman he’d loved since she was a gangly kid with braces, who was now wearing his ring and carrying a secret that could shatter a future with just them. “What have you done?”