The Night of No Sleep
Chapter 08 - The Night of No Sleep
Nora did not let Adrian stay in the apartment.
He did not argue.
That, more than anything, unsettled her.
The Adrian she remembered would have argued beautifully. He would have called it protection, used his low urgent voice, explained risk and logistics until agreement felt like the only responsible choice. He would have made himself necessary before anyone could decide whether they wanted him there.
This Adrian stood in the hall with his ruined shirt and wine-stained cuff, holding a grocery bag full of food Mrs. Bell had insisted he bring upstairs.
“I’ll be in the car,” he said. “Two officers will remain outside. If you need anything, call me or call them.”
Nora crossed her arms. “You can go home.”
“I don’t have one tonight.”
The words landed quietly.
Oliver peeked from behind the apartment door. “Where do you sleep?”
Adrian crouched to his height. “Usually in a house that’s too big.”
“With the mean lady?”
“No,” Adrian said. “Not ever again.”
Oliver considered this with the seriousness of a child sorting laws of the universe.
“Good.”
Then he disappeared inside.
Nora almost smiled. Almost.
At two in the morning, she found herself standing by the window, looking down at Adrian’s car. The engine was off. A police cruiser sat across the street. Adrian leaned against the hood under the bakery awning, phone to his ear, speaking to someone with controlled fury.
She should have felt relieved.
Instead, memory rose.
Five years earlier, in a hospital recovery room, Nora had woken from medication and panic to find Margot Voss standing beside the bed with a clipboard. Margot had said Adrian had received the paternity information and wanted no contact. Isla had cried in the corner like a friend forced into cruelty by facts. A doctor had avoided Nora’s eyes. A nurse had taken the baby “for testing.”
Nora had screamed until her throat tore.
They called it postpartum psychosis.
Then they gave her papers.
The next day, Mrs. Bell smuggled Oliver out with the help of a junior nurse who disappeared from the hospital records two weeks later. Nora ran before sunrise, bleeding, dizzy, holding her newborn beneath a borrowed coat.
For five years, the whole world had told her to stop telling a story powerful people had already ended.
A soft sound came from the sofa.
Oliver slept curled around the faceless father drawing. Nora sat beside him and touched his hair.
“He came,” Oliver murmured.
“He did.”
“Will he leave?”
Nora stared at the window.
Down below, Adrian ended his call and looked up. Not at her window exactly. He didn’t know which one. He simply looked up at the building where his son slept, and stayed.
“I don’t know,” Nora whispered.
But for the first time, the answer frightened her less than it used to.
At dawn, Adrian received a file from Maya Chen.
It contained the real paternity test, buried under a false lab number.
Probability of paternity: 99.9998%.
Below it was Isla’s digital signature.
Nora watched from the window as Adrian read it.
He did not shout.
May you like
He did not throw the phone.
He simply folded at the waist, one hand against the bakery wall, as if grief had finally found the exact place to enter.
