Before There Was a Baby

POV Caroline

"I expected nothing from you, and I'm still disappointed."

My mother's voice follows me onto the dance floor, threading through the bass that pounds against my ribs like a second heartbeat. The only one I can feel anymore.

The club pulses around me in smears of neon pink and electric blue, lights sliding across my vision like oil on water. I'm drunk. Properly, devastatingly drunk, the kind that turns my bones liquid and my mind into static.

Good enough. I came here to disappear.

I dance alone in the crowd, letting bodies bump against me, letting the music swallow me whole. A man tries to press himself against my back, and I spin away without looking at his face.

I don't want faces tonight. I don't want names or numbers or the hollow performance of human connection.

I want to be nothing. No one. Just a body moving in the dark.

But the alcohol isn't strong enough to drown the voices.

"Such a shame she didn't get the Ellsworth charm." My aunt's pitying smile at Christmas, her hand patting my cheek like I was a dog that had failed to learn a trick.

"William will handle the presentation. Caroline, you can take notes." My father's eyes sliding past me, always past me, to the golden son standing at his right hand.

"Eleven minutes." My mother, on my sixteenth birthday, when someone made the mistake of asking about twins. "Eleven minutes later, and the wrong gender entirely. The doctor promised me two boys."

I dance harder. Faster. The neon lights make me nauseous, and the press of strangers makes my skin crawl, but I can't leave.

Tomorrow morning, I have to bury my brother.

I have to stand at a grave and pretend I'm only losing a sibling. Not my twin. Not the other half of my heartbeat. Not the only person in twenty-seven years who looked at me and saw someone worth seeing.

Another voice cuts through the noise. Not a memory of cruelty this time.

Worse.

Will's laugh, warm and conspiratorial. The way it sounded when we were children hiding from Mother's dinner parties. The way he called me Caro like those four letters contained an entire language only we could speak.

His last text sits unread on my phone. I can't fully open it. Reading it would make this final.

‘Home soon. Save me from Mother's seating chart cris…’

He never came home.

I stop dancing and when the room tilts violently, I grab for something solid and find only air.

I'm going to be sick or scream or shatter into pieces right here on this sticky floor.

And I can't do any of those things because Ellsworths don't make scenes. Ellsworths endure, Ellsworths swallow their grief like glass and smile through the bleeding.

"You look like you need to leave."

The voice comes from my left. Low, certain, cutting through the bass like it belongs to someone who has never had to raise his voice to be heard.

I turn and find a man standing beside me.

Dark hair, darker eyes, a face carved from something harder than patience. Tall, broad-shouldered, wearing a charcoal suit that costs more than most people's cars.

He doesn't touch me. Doesn't leer. Just looks at me with clinical assessment, like I'm a problem he's deciding whether to solve.

"That's not a question," I say, and my voice sounds strange to my own ears.

"It's not meant to be." He tilts his head slightly, studying me. "You've been here for forty minutes. You haven't smiled once. And you're about three drinks past the point where most people can stand upright."

"You've been watching me for forty minutes?"

"You're the only one who looks like she's attending her own funeral."

The word hits me like a slap.

Funeral. Tomorrow. Will's body in a polished box, lowered into frozen ground while strangers cry performative tears.

"That's an interesting observation," I managed. "Do you always psychoanalyze women in clubs, or am I special?"

"I don't psychoanalyze anyone. I observe." He slides his hands into his pockets, and I notice the sharp edge of a thin scar across his left knuckles. "And you're deflecting, which tells me I'm right."

"You don't know anything about me."

"I know you came here alone, refused every man who approached you, but you haven't left. I know you're drinking like someone who wants to forget something, but whatever it is, it's not working." His dark eyes hold mine, unblinking. "And I know that if you stay here much longer, you're going to do something you'll regret."