The weekend with Julian was a quiet, aching failure.

They played video games in the living room, the sound effects too loud in the cavernous silence. They ordered pizza that neither of them finished. Robin tried to summon the easy, performative dad-energy that used to come so naturally, but it felt like trying to start a car with a dead battery. Every joke landed flat. Every attempt at conversation hit a wall.

“Is April coming over?” Julian had asked on Saturday afternoon, not looking up from his phone.

“No, buddy. April and I aren’t together anymore.”

Julian had finally looked at him then. His son’s eyes, so much like Paula’s, held a weary understanding that no twelve-year-old should possess. “Did you break her heart, too? Like you did with Mom?”

The question hung in the air between them, sharp and final. Robin had no answer. He just looked at his son, the silence stretching until it became its own answer. Julian had simply nodded, a small, resigned motion, and gone back to his screen. The rest of the weekend passed in a polite, hollow détente. When Robin dropped him off at Paula’s on Sunday evening, the goodbye was a quick, stiff hug. Julian didn’t ask when he’d see him again.

The mansion swallowed Robin whole when he returned. The silence was a physical presence. He poured a drink, then another, but the alcohol just made the quiet feel louder, more accusatory. He couldn’t sit in it. He couldn’t stand it. He pulled out his phone, scrolling through contacts until he found the numbers he’d saved after the last show. Two names. Two profiles. A planned distraction.

They arrived an hour later, all laughter and shiny hair and practiced, hungry smiles. Sasha and Chloe. Their presence was immediate, filling the sterile space with perfume and sound and intent. They didn’t waste time. Hands were on him before the door fully closed, mouths finding his neck, his jaw, their words a blur of flattery and filth. They led him, or he led them, it didn’t matter, to the sprawling sectional in the great room.

Clothes became a trail on the marble floor. Sasha, a brunette with endless legs, knelt before him, taking his cock into her mouth with a slow, deep expertise that made his head fall back. Chloe, blonde and curvy, pressed against his side, her mouth on his ear, whispering what she was going to do to him next. It was a symphony of sensation, expertly orchestrated to overwhelm. Robin let it. He closed his eyes and gave himself to the mechanics of it, the wet heat, the grasping hands, the friction.

They moved to the floor, a tangle of limbs on the expensive rug. Chloe straddled his face, her taste musky and sharp, while Sasha guided him into her from above. The room filled with the sounds of them: wet, rhythmic slaps, high, theatrical moans, the rustle of fabric under shifting bodies. Robin moved, he thrust, he performed. He made Sasha come with his fingers while his tongue worked on Chloe, and when they switched, when Chloe sank down onto him with a gasp, he matched her pace, driving up into her. It was relentless. It was empty.

His mind floated outside it all, a cold, detached observer. He watched himself fuck these beautiful, willing strangers in his multimillion-dollar home, and all he could see was Julian’s resigned nod. All he could hear was the silence after his son’s question.

He needed a condom. The thought was a clinical interruption. “Don’t stop,” he grunted to Chloe, who was rocking against him, her nails digging into his chest. He slid out from under her, his cock slick and glistening in the low light. “Be right back.”

He padded naked down the hall to his master bathroom, the mansion’s air conditioning raising goosebumps on his sweat-damp skin. He pushed the door open, blinking in the brighter light. He went straight to the cabinet, rummaging past bottles of cologne and aspirin for the box of condoms.

As he turned, the small black bin beside the vanity caught his eye. Something white and rectangular peeked out from under a wad of tissues. Not his. He never used that bin. A cold trickle, unrelated to the air conditioning, traced his spine. He bent down, hooking a finger to lift the tissue away.

It was a pregnancy test. Clearblue. The plastic stick lay diagonally in the bin. His breath stopped in his throat. His eyes locked onto the result window.

A solid red ring.

Pregnant.

The world narrowed to that small, digital circle. The sounds from the great room—the giggles, the music still playing—muffled into a distant hum. Blood roared in his ears. He picked it up, his fingers trembling. The plastic was cool. He turned it over, as if the back might offer some other explanation. It didn’t.

Who? The question was a siren in his skull. Sasha? Chloe? They’d just arrived. Impossible. Lena? She was on the pill, she’d said. The woman from the van? A nameless, faceless blur. But none of them had been here, in this bathroom, in this house. This was his private space. April’s space. When she’d lived here, this was their bathroom.

April.

The name hit him like a physical blow. The last time she was here… the confrontation, the hurt in her eyes, her packing her things. She’d used this bathroom. She could have… She must have…

Could it be from her? The timeline clicked into place with a terrifying clarity. Their last time together, before everything shattered, was raw and desperate and real. They hadn’t used anything. He’d been too lost in her, in trying to hold onto something that was already slipping away.

Maybe she didn’t tell him. The thought was a knife twist. She found out. She took the test here, in the silence of his empty mansion, saw the result, and left. She left him, carrying that secret, believing he was exactly what Paula said he was: incapable of love, a man who broke hearts for a living.

“Robin? Everything okay?” Chloe’s voice called from down the hall, sing-song and impatient.

He didn’t answer. He stared at the red ring, the future contained in a piece of plastic in his trembling hand. The hollow he’d been trying to fill with strangers yawned wider, deeper, becoming a chasm. He wasn’t just empty. He was responsible for a new, unseen life. And the woman who might be carrying it was gone, because of him.

The cold marble under his feet felt like the floor of a tomb. The laughter from the other room sounded like a mockery. He was going to be sick.