Chapter 3 - The Coldest Wait
The door opened softly, and Dr. Mercer returned to the room, accompanied by a senior phlebotomist pushing a tray lined with sterile vials and needles.
Dorian rose to his feet immediately, wiping his face with the back of his hand and retreating to the wall, trying desperately to rebuild his armored facade. But the mask was broken beyond repair; the man standing before me was stripped bare, bleeding from wounds he had kept hidden in the dark for half a year.
“Maya,” Dr. Mercer said gently, pulling a rolling stool beside my bed. “Before we discuss prenatal options, we need to know where Dorian stands. We received the finalized confirmation on his secondary genetic sequence forty-eight hours ago. I called his office yesterday morning.”
My breath caught in my throat. I snapped my head toward Dorian. “You have your results? You knew before we walked into that conference room today?”
Dorian didn’t answer. He couldn’t. He stood pressed against the drywall, staring blankly ahead as if looking straight into an open grave.
“His results were sealed at his request,” Dr. Mercer explained, her tone heavy with medical gravity. “Dorian instructed my clinic to withhold the physical envelope until his personal legal affairs were settled. He refused to open them before the divorce decree was signed.”
“You coward,” I whispered, though my heart was breaking for him. “You were going to let me leave, sign your life away, and face the verdict all by yourself?”
“If it was positive, telling you would have guilted you into staying,” Dorian said, his jaw clenching so hard a muscle twitched in his cheek. “And if it was negative... I had already broken you for six months. How could I ask you to forgive the cruelty I inflicted on you, even if the shadow was gone?”
“You don’t get to play the tragic martyr anymore, Dorian Cross,” I said firmly, wiping my wet cheeks with the rough sleeve of my hospital gown. I held out my arm toward the phlebotomist. “Take whatever blood you need for our baby. And Elaine? Bring his file in here right now.”
The needle stung as it entered the vein in my arm, drawing vial after vial of dark crimson blood. The samples would be sent for immediate chorionic villus sampling and specialized fetal DNA sequencing—a rapid diagnostic panel North Shore Memorial could rush through its advanced genetic research lab within twenty-four hours.
While the technician labeled my vials, Dr. Mercer stepped out of the room once more. When she returned, she held a thick, heavy cream envelope sealed with red tamper-evident tape. On the front, Dorian’s full name and confidential medical identification number were stamped in bold black ink.
She handed it directly to Dorian.
He looked down at the envelope in his hands as if it were packed with dynamite. His fingers, usually so steady when signing multimillion-dollar contracts, trembled so hard the paper rattled against his palms.
“Open it,” I said softly from the bed.
“Maya... if that number is over forty repeats,” he whispered, his eyes wide with an agony no amount of wealth could cure, “my fate is sealed. In ten years, I won't know your name. And this child inside you will live under the exact same shadow I have lived under since Boston.”
“Then we will face it together,” I replied, stepping down from the bed and crossing the small distance between us. I took his cold, shaking hands in mine, wrapping my fingers over his. “You thought you were saving me by pushing me into the dark, Dorian. But love isn't about running away from the storm to save the other person from getting wet. It’s about standing in the rain together until the sky clears, or until the world ends.”
A single tear slipped down Dorian’s cheek. He closed his eyes, pressed his forehead against mine, and let out a ragged, shuddering breath that felt like a lifetime of surrender.
With trembling fingers, he hooked his thumb beneath the red security tape and ripped the envelope open.
He pulled out the three-page diagnostic summary. His eyes darted down the dense technical jargon, past the laboratory control benchmarks, straight to the highlighted summary box at the bottom of the first page:
CAG Trinucleotide Repeat Count: Allele 1: 17 repeats (Normal). Allele 2: 19 repeats (Normal).
Interpretation: NEGATIVE. No genetic expansion detected.
Dorian stopped breathing. He stared at the bold letters, his lips parting, unable to process the symbols on the page.
“Elaine?” he choked out, turning the paper blindly toward the doctor. “What... what does nineteen mean?”
May you like
Dr. Mercer smiled, her eyes brimming with unshed tears. “A normal person has between ten and twenty-six repeats, Dorian. Your mother carried the full mutant allele with forty-four repeats. But the genetic roll of the dice fell in your favor. You inherited your father’s healthy chromosome. You do not carry the gene. You will never develop Huntington’s disease.”
She paused, looking between the two of us with profound warmth. “And because you are completely gene-negative, Dorian... there is a zero percent chance your child will ever inherit it. The curse ended with your uncle Arthur. Your baby is safe.”
