Page 107 of Once Upon A Second Chance

I meet his eyes head-on. “If she’s pregnant, we’ll handle it together. If she’s not, we’ll keep moving forward. Either way? It’s not your decision to make. It’s ours.”

We stand there a beat longer in tense silence.

Eventually, Jesse looks away. Just for a second. Then back at me. “She’d better not cry over you again.”

“She won’t,” I say. “At least not because Imade her.”

He gives me one last, unreadable look, then turns and walks off without another word.

I stand there in the still heat of the evening for a long moment after he’s gone, staring down the road where his truck disappears from view.

My chest still aches from what he said—She died thinking you were the one man who’d never come back for her—but I don’t let it unravel me.

Not this time.

Instead, I reach for my phone and keys.

Because there’s only one person I want to see tonight.

And she’s the one who deserves to hear what I didn’t get to say before.

The lights are on in her living room, but the house is quiet when I knock.

No footsteps, no Bijou barking, no movement at all.

I knockagain, softer. “Penny?”

After a beat, I hear it—the creak of floorboards, the faint pad of bare feet across tile. She opens the door slowly, robe cinched tight, hair pulled up, face bare.

She looks tired. Not just end-of-a-long-day tired. This is bone-deep, soul-level weariness.

“I came,” I say, and immediately feel like an idiot for stating the obvious.

But she nods, stepping back to let me in.

“I didn’t take it yet,” she murmurs, voice barely louder than the rain starting to tap against the porch roof outside. “I was waiting for you.”

The words hit me harder than they should.

Not because I earned them.

Because she said them anyway.

We walk to the back of the house in silence, past the hallway where pictures of her family line the walls—her mother smiling in every one of them, like she knew how to capture joy before it slipped through.

The bathroom door is already open, the little white test box sitting on the edge of the sink.

She picks it up, turns it over once, and then holds it in her hand like it’s heavier than it looks.

“I don’t want to do this alone,” she says, not looking at me. “But I hate that I don’t get to know first. I wanted—God, I don’t know—just a minute to sit with it before anyone else had a claim on what it meant.”

“You still do,” I say quietly. “I’m not here to take that from you. I’m just... here.”

After a beat, she nods again and disappears behind the door. I hear the rustle of the plastic wrapper, the sound of water running, then the click of the test being set on the counter.

She opens the door again, eyes wide, cheeks flushed.

“Three minutes,” she says.