You should close the laptop and sleep.
Instead, you touch the edge of the ultrasound photo lying beside his card and feel the three tiny heartbeats echo inside your mind like a promise and a warning at the same time. You are twenty-nine, newly divorced, six months pregnant, sleeping in a room barely big enough for a bed and a table, and the only man who has shown you unexpected kindness in weeks turns out to be the kind of man entire boardrooms stand up for. Fate, you think, has a terrible sense of timing.
Sofía watches you from the doorway with two paper cups of coffee and eyes too sharp to miss anything.
“You’re thinking about calling him,” she says.
You don’t deny it.
Sofía Morales has known you since university, since before Alejandro’s polished smile and expensive promises and the life that looked golden from the outside and hollow from the inside. She has seen you survive exams, heartbreak, and the early brutal years when you helped build Alejandro’s health-tech network into something worth being photographed beside. She also knows the look on your face when you are standing on the edge of a choice you are not ready to admit has already chosen you.
“I’m thinking,” you say.
“That usually means yes in slow motion.”
