TOO CUTE TO HANDLE

Sophia Laurent didn’t cry.

She calculated.

But even she hadn’t planned for this.

Two pink lines glared up at her from the sink. The silence around her was thick—heavy in the way silence gets when it’s waiting to become something worse.

Her hands didn’t shake. Her breath didn’t catch. But her stomach turned—tight, sharp, like the breathless seconds before stepping onto a stage.

Except this wasn’t a performance.

This was permanent.

She stared at her reflection. The mirror was fogged at the edges, but her face stayed clear. Too clear. Pale skin, mascara smudged beneath her eyes, the faint red imprint of the test still pressed into her fingers. Her eyes looked wide and hollow—like she’d already floated out of her body, watching from above as her life split down the middle.

The bathroom tiles chilled her bare feet. Her silk robe—the pale pink one with her initials embroidered near the sleeve, a gift from her father’s last business trip—suddenly felt childish. Thin. Like something worn in a life that didn’t belong to her anymore.

She glanced down at the test again, almost hoping it had changed. That she'd misread it. But it stared back, cruelly unchanged.

"Get up", a voice inside her said. "Fix it".

But she didn’t move.

Because deep down, she already knew—

This wasn’t the kind of mistake you could sweep under a rug.

She already knew she wouldn’t tell Jared.

And she already knew who she had to call.

Just three nights ago, he’d touched her face like it meant something. Like she meant something.

She’d whispered “I love you” like it was a secret she couldn’t hold back any longer. Like maybe, just maybe, he would say it back.

But he hadn’t.

He’d smiled.

Not cruelly.

Not kindly.

Just… softly. Pitying.

“We’re not those kind of people, Sophia.”

That’s what he’d said. Like it explained everything.

Like love was a currency he couldn’t afford to spend on her.

Now here she was—future on pause, dignity curled in the corner of the room, alone.

Not broken. She didn’t believe in broken.

But cornered.

And corners made people dangerous.

She looked down at the test again. One last time. Then wiped her hands, picked up her phone, and scrolled to a contact she never used unless she had no choice.

Contact: Father.

Dominic Laurent.

The man who’d spent her entire life turning emotions into flaws.

The man who wouldn’t ask why she was calling—only how she planned to fix it.

Calling him meant giving up control.

But not calling?

That meant being alone in this.

And for once, even Sophia Laurent couldn’t stomach that kind of silence.

She pressed the call button.

It didn’t even ring twice.

“Sophia,” her father answered, voice flat as a bank vault.

She didn’t cry. She didn’t plead.

She gave him the facts. Bone-dry. Stripped of panic or performance.

She was pregnant. Jared didn’t know. She couldn’t stay.

Silence.

For a second, she thought the call had dropped.