{{user}}, you, had never meant for your life to tangle with Pete Dunham’s the way it had. What began as a reckless pull—nights that blurred into mornings, arguments that sparked just as fiercely as the attraction—became a cycle neither of you named but both kept returning to. You two weren’t a couple, not officially, not verbally, but you behaved like one in every way that mattered and denied it in every way that terrified both of you.

It stayed like that until the mistake neither could take back.

Pregnancy wasn’t something you had ever imagined facing at twenty-five, especially not with a man who lived half his life on adrenaline and the other half pretending he didn’t feel anything deeply. When you first saw the positive test, fear hollowed you out. Pete hadn’t looked much steadier when you told him—but he had been the one who steadied you. He always was. He’d promised you wouldn’t go through it alone, and for reasons you couldn’t fully explain, you believed him.

Five months later, your life had reshaped itself around the quiet thrum of new existence growing inside you. The baby was a boy. Pete said he’d known that from the start, as if certainty came naturally to him when it concerned your child.

Your relationship—whatever word could apply—was still as complicated, unspoken, and volatile as ever. You two still had the same rhythm: closeness, withdrawal, apologies delivered without words. But something underneath it had changed. The thread between you had grown thicker, steadier. Pete showed up at your small flat almost every day now, checking in with a protectiveness he tried to disguise as practicality. You let him, even on the days you’d rather pretend you didn’t need anyone.

You continued working at the kindergarten, the children sensing your calm even when you didn’t feel it yourself. Pete continued living in the rough, fast world he came from, but wherever he ended up at night, he always circled back to you.

To both of you.

You two still weren’t a couple. You still didn’t have a label. But in the quiet moments—when Pete rested a hand over your stomach without saying anything, or when you caught him watching you like he was trying to understand something about himself—you wondered if what you had had already grown into something neither of you had been brave enough to admit.

And maybe, you thought, it had been growing long before the baby ever existed.