All Chapters of Pregnant and Rejected, Now She’s Back!: Chapter 81 - Chapter 90

I was waiting for him to push.This was the honest thing I had not said to Seth or to anyone else, the thing that lived underneath the rules and was why the rules existed in the first place. I had written them as boundaries but they were also, if I was precise about it, tripwires. Structures designed to catch the moment when the man I had married would reassert himself, when the patience would run out and the old mechanisms would return, the pressure and the leverage and the specific quality of coldness that had been his primary mode of communication across three years of a marriage that required me to always be reaching and never quite arriving.I had been waiting.He was not pushing.Five weeks in and he had not once tested the edges of the arrangement, had not once angled for more than I had indicated I was giving, had not once used the access the arrangement gave him as a foundation for anything I had not offered. He moved within whatever space I gave him, consistently and without

Darius’s POV He finds out through a news alert on his phone. The headline is three words: “Producer Shot on Set.” He doesn’t read the rest of it. He doesn’t need to. The entire world shrinks down to those three words and the accompanying image, which is a photo of Brynn from some industry event from months ago, smiling, professional, completely unaware that her entire life is about to change. His entire body goes cold. He is in a board meeting with sixteen people present, the CFO is in the middle of presenting quarterly projections, numbers that seemed important five seconds ago, and he stands up in the middle of someone’s sentence and leaves without explanation. His assistant follows him into the corridor asking questions he doesn’t answer. He doesn’t even know what his assistant’s name is in this moment. Nothing matters except the three words on his phone. He calls Seth. Seth picks up on the first ring, before the phone even completes its first ring, and tells him she is in surge

Seth’s POV While Brynn is recovering, I start asking harder questions. The prop manager’s statement sits in front of me, printed out, and I’ve read it so many times the words are starting to blur together. Cataloguing error. Wrong gun was logged. Clerical mistake. Nobody’s fault. The language is passive, deflecting, designed to distribute blame so evenly that it lands on no one. It’s the kind of statement someone makes when they’ve been carefully coached about what to say. I read it a third time and find four things that don’t add up First, the gun in question wasn’t on any of the equipment lists until the day before the shoot. There’s a gap of two weeks where it doesn’t exist in any of the production company’s systems, and then suddenly it appears, logged and accounted for. That’s not a clerical error. That’s a deliberate insertion. Second, the prop manager who logged it—Thomas Pierce, twenty-three years old, one year out of film school—had been hired specifically for this produc

Vivienne’s POV Vivienne sends flowers to the hospital the morning after the shooting. White lilies, elegant, expensive, the kind that look like they cost more than they actually do. The arrangement is designed by someone who understands aesthetic and message. The card is handwritten in her careful script. “Shocked and devastated by what happened. Wishing you a full and speedy recovery. Vivienne.” She means none of it. Every word is perfectly chosen. The flowers are a statement. The card is strategic. The message is designed to establish her as concerned, compassionate, the kind of woman who sends flowers to people she cares about. The message is designed to be quoted if anyone asks why she’s invested in Brynn’s recovery. The message is designed to create distance between herself and the crime. She doesn’t know if the plan worked. She doesn’t know if Brynn was actually hit or if the shot went wide or if the gun malfunctioned or if something went wrong in the prop room. She’s spent

Darius’s POV Back at his office Darius can’t focus. He’s been back for two days and his assistant has already complained twice about his lack of attention in meetings. She brought him documents to sign and he looked at them without seeing them. She asked him for direction on an acquisition and he deflected. She mentioned that a client had called wanting to reschedule and he told her to handle it, which is not like him. Darius doesn’t delegate client management. But right now he can’t pretend to care about any of it. His CFO asked him to review the acquisition paperwork and he read it without absorbing a single word. The numbers made sense on a surface level but they meant nothing to him. Numbers that mattered a week ago now feel irrelevant. His mother called asking about his engagement and he deflected so smoothly that she probably didn’t notice he didn’t actually answer the question. She asked about Brynn, about how the shooting happened, about whether Brynn was truly all right, an