After Our Fall, Love Reclaimed

After listing the house with a real estate agent, I temporarily settled into a budget hotel.

Jayden Lewis hadn't reached out to me again. Instead, he flaunted his relationship with Selah Martin all over social media. Calls kept pouring in:

"Lilah, are you and Jayden on the rocks?"

"Is Selah, the goddess herself, planning a wedding with Jayden?"

"I heard they were ring shopping yesterday..."

I didn't respond to any of it. I just looked at my reflection in the mirror, noticing the slight swell of my belly. Then, I called the agent again, lowering the price by another fifty thousand dollars. I wanted to leave Washington, D.C., behind as soon as possible.

The child inside me was an unexpected twist of fate. By the time I realized it, I was already three months along. The doctor said the fetus was well-developed, with tiny hands and feet. As I lay there, tears suddenly welled up and spilled over. But after much thought, I decided to terminate the pregnancy.

Yet, perhaps it was destiny. Just as I was about to go through with the procedure, chaos erupted nearby, and the sound of distant explosions reached us. The hospital plunged into darkness as the power failed.

And so, this child stayed.

I comforted myself with the thought that at least his father was a strikingly handsome man of Eastern European descent.

Jayden had abandoned me in that chaotic foreign place. The risks of being a young, attractive single woman there were obvious. Whether I ended up in dire circumstances or chose a path that offered some semblance of safety, when I cried out for help, I had already accepted the path before me. When he reached out to me in aid, my destiny took a new course.

The father of my baby was that handsome, disturbingly wealthy Eastern European man with a shred of decency left. Far better than Jayden, at least.

In its own way, wasn't this a small mercy from fate?