Alpha – Chapter 15

The proposal

Los Angeles – Three weeks later

Michael

The studio felt different after weeks away, as if someone had taken the familiar shape of the room and rotated it a few degrees off its axis. The lights were the same, the smell of warm dust and old carpet the same, the slow throb of the consoles waiting to be used – all identical, all unchanged. And yet I couldn’t shake the sense that I was moving through an imitation of my life rather than the real thing, a replica built overnight while I wasn’t looking.

Bruce and Brad were trying – God bless them, they were truly trying – to pretend everything was normal. They spoke in their usual shorthand, adjusted levels, traded comments about tape hiss and mic placement, but none of it quite rang with the easy confidence we used to move in. They kept glancing at me in the way people do when they’re checking for cracks they hope they won’t find.

Everyone knew about Joseph’s interview. Everyone knew what followed. But no one dared bring it up, as if the wrong word might tip the whole day into disaster.

I had ended up calling him, of course. Forcing myself not to feel too nauseous at the idea of having to fend him off – again.

I hadn’t even planned to talk to him, knowing well it would be pointless, but the morning after I returned to Los Angeles, when the headlines were spreading like a virus and the paparazzi had started to swarm Lisa’s building, something inside me snapped. I dialed his number before I could think better of it. The conversation was brief, sharp-edged, useless – two people speaking in parallel, neither truly hearing the other. He insisted he had done nothing wrong, that he had been “supportive,” that the media was always hungry and I should use the attention while it lasted. I told him, with more anger than I intended, that he had violated boundaries he didn’t even respect in the first place.

He laughed, the same dismissive sound he used when I was a boy trying to protest a rehearsal that had stretched past midnight.

“You live in the spotlight, Michael. You should know how to use it by now.”

I hung up before I said something I couldn’t take back, but the call stayed with me, pulsing beneath my skin like a low-grade fever. It was the moment I realized the past wasn’t done with me, that Joseph’s reach still extended into places I had thought were finally my own.

I carried that tension into the booth, where I slipped the headphones over my ears and tried to pretend I could lose myself in the track. Music usually grounded me, but the melody skimmed over my mind like a thin shadow, unable to reach whatever part of me was still clenched from Hawaii.

I stopped halfway through a verse I’d sung a hundred times.

“Mike… maybe take a breather?” Bruce said through the talkback, his voice gentle but cautious.

It wasn’t unkind, just careful. Everything around me had taken on that quality lately: careful hands, careful voices, careful silences.

I set the headphones down and stepped out of the booth, letting the heavy door click shut behind me. The hallway beyond was cool and dim, humming faintly with the low machinery that kept the whole place alive. I leaned against the wall and exhaled slowly, trying to ease the tightness coiled beneath my ribs.

There was a stack of messages waiting for me on a nearby table – handwritten notes from assistants, scribbled reminders from security, clipped newspaper clippings someone had thought I should see. I didn’t touch them. I already knew what they said. The tabloids had multiplied like weeds since Joseph opened his mouth, spiraling from speculation to obsession. Every morning brought a new headline, a new rumor, a new grainy photo of Lisa entering or leaving somewhere with her head down, one hand instinctively covering her abdomen.

They were hunting her, and I wasn’t there to shield her.

Lisa had insisted that distance was necessary, that it was better this way… for the time being, at least. She needed quiet, she’d said. Control. Space to think without cameras shoved down her throat. And she wasn’t wrong about the cameras: after all, paparazzi had started gathering outside her building before the jet from Maui had even landed. I understood her point, I really did. But understanding didn’t make the separation easier.

Space had a way of stretching into distance, and distance had a way of becoming silence.

We still spoke – or rather, she called when she could, when it seemed safe, when her mother wasn’t hovering. Most of all, when she felt like it. It was always in short bursts, always with the same steady tone that told me more about what she didn’t say than what she did.

She was staying at Priscilla’s now; she’d mentioned it casually one night, as if it were an inconvenience rather than a defeat. I knew better. I’d heard enough in her voice to understand the compromise she’d made. It must have been unbearable in that house, but less unbearable than facing everything alone.

I covered my eyes with one hand, pressing gently against the ache building behind them.

It had been three weeks since the proposal. And exactly three weeks since she asked me to leave.

I don’t think I understood, until those words left her mouth, how quickly someone could become the center of a life they hadn’t planned for. Hawaii had been a bubble, fragile and bright, and Priscilla had stepped inside it with the kind of calculated grace that made shattering things look like an art form. That morning, when Lisa came back to the bedroom after that confrontation – pale, exhausted, shaking in a way she tried to hide – something inside me had already started shifting, tightening, fastening itself to her with a clarity that frightened me.

Later that evening, I had gone to the small study in the house and called my mother, looking for something steady to hold on to. I’d asked about Joseph, about what he’d done, about why he would say something like that knowing the storm it would unleash. Katherine didn’t have answers, not really, but she listened, and she prayed with me, and she said softly, If you care about her, you do right by her.

The words had struck something deep and unresolved.

Marriage.

I hadn’t planned to say it and I hadn’t even thought it before that moment. Neither of us had brought up marriage the previous night, before Priscilla arrived, while we were considering our options.

But after hearing Lisa arguing with her mother, hearing the fear beneath her anger, seeing the way the world had already begun to circle her like vultures, it suddenly felt like the only shield I had to offer. It felt like the only gesture that meant anything in the face of forces neither of us could outrun.

She hadn’t heard it that way. She had heard something else entirely – pity, obligation, correction. To her, it was a cage disguised as protection.

“I don’t need saving, Michael. You don’t need to fix me. And I won’t be your pity project.”

The memory pressed against my chest. I lowered my head, staring at the blank wall ahead of me.

I wasn’t just missing her. And God knew, I was missing her like crazy – way more than I would have expected, hoped even. I was also missing weeks of her pregnancy, weeks of changes she was living without me. And the more time passed, the more I realized my fear wasn’t only about the baby, wasn’t only about the press or Joseph or the storm he’d unleashed. It was about her – the quiet gravity she had, the way she saw me, the way something in me had started reaching for her long before I’d admitted it to myself.

I pushed away from the wall, smoothing my hands over my face.

The studio door loomed ahead, and for a moment I didn’t know whether I was supposed to walk back through it or keep standing here until the world arranged itself into something I understood.

But nothing had felt understandable since that night in Maui, since the look she gave me when she whispered, I think you should go.

I opened the studio door anyway, stepping back into the dimmed down lights and cautious glances, performing steadiness I didn’t feel.

Somewhere in the city, she was moving through her own quiet battle — alone, protected, surrounded, suffocated — and I had no idea how to reach her without making everything worse.

I wasn’t sure when the proposal had become a wound, but I did know that I was still bleeding from it.

Into the booth, the room seemed even smaller than before. Bruce adjusted a dial, then lifted a hand in quiet reassurance, and I tried – again – to pull my focus toward the track.

The headphones felt heavy when I put them on, pressing against my temples. I closed my eyes, waiting for the music to start and willing myself into the present long enough to sing a single clean line.

But the moment the first chord rose through the speakers, something inside me tightened.

I let out a slow exhale, the kind meant to ground me. Instead it sent me lurching backward into memory.

Lisa’s voice drifted up in that quiet, exhausted tone she’d used the night she came back from speaking to her mother – the way she said my name as though it already contained a fracture.

The way she wouldn’t meet my eyes. The stillness of her body under the covers. The silence that felt nothing like peace.

My jaw clenched. I opened my eyes again, but the booth had already started dissolving. The glass in front of me blurred. The lights above me dimmed into the golden wash of a Hawaiian afternoon. The scent of warm electronics shifted into the faint trace of sunscreen and salt that had lived on her skin for days.

I was no longer in Los Angeles.

I was back in that villa, in that narrow space between hope and something that felt dangerously like loss.

A single moment in the present pushed me over the edge:

Brad’s voice crackling through the talkback – “Mike? Everything alright?” – and landing with the exact intonation Mother had used on the phone when she asked if I was sure I wanted to do this.

And beneath that echo, the past stirred and opened, dragging me back to the moment everything began to crack.

Maui, three weeks earlier

The villa had settled into an almost oppressive quiet, the kind that didn’t soothe so much as press against the skin, amplifying every thought I was trying not to have. Afternoon light drifted across the floor in long, soft ribbons, but even that seemed muted, as if the house itself were holding its breath after the storm Priscilla had dragged through it.

Lisa had retreated to the bedroom and stayed there, barely shifting beneath the covers except to curl farther in on herself. I had hovered in the doorway earlier, unsure whether approaching her would comfort her or make everything harder. The tension in her shoulders was unmistakable: that rigid, fragile kind of stillness people adopt when they’re trying to keep themselves from splintering. I recognized it instantly because I had worn that same posture in far too many childhood bedrooms, far too many dressing rooms, after far too many “lessons” from Joseph.

So I stepped back, giving her the space she seemed to need, even though it felt like tearing something in half inside me.

The rest of the day unfolded in a strange, suspended rhythm. I kept drifting from room to room as though movement might help organize my thoughts, but nothing settled. I opened books I couldn’t read, sketched a few bars of music that disintegrated on the page, tried pacing the deck in long strides only to find myself stopping every few minutes to glance toward the bedroom window, hoping for a sign she might be ready to talk, or even just ready to look at me.

Instead, the world outside continued tightening its grip.

Even without turning on a television, I knew the tabloids would be gathering like vultures. Joseph hadn’t mentioned the pregnancy – of that much, at least, I was certain. It wasn’t because he wanted to protect us – he simply didn’t know. But by confirming the relationship, he had done something almost worse: he had shifted the spotlight directly onto Lisa, a woman who was already vulnerable and who would, within weeks, be carrying a visible truth she had desperately wanted to navigate in private.

Her body would start revealing what her mouth could not, and the world would devour it.

Devour her.

The knowledge throbbed at the back of my mind: once the press started circling a story like this, there was no pulling them back. A simple hint from someone as strategic as Joseph was enough to send journalists digging, tracing flight manifests, staking out the Presleys’ homes, inventing whatever pieces of narrative they couldn’t confirm. And God only knew what Priscilla’s next move would be.

Lisa… she had never asked for this. She had never been trained for it, or protected from it the way I had been all my life. She was strong, yes, fiercer than anyone gave her credit for, but strength didn’t stop a tidal wave.

I found myself in the kitchen at one point, standing in front of a glass of water I’d filled but forgotten to drink. The reflection in the window startled me. The tension carved into my jaw, the tightness around my eyes. I looked like someone bracing for a blow, not someone on a tropical island meant to be resting.

That was when Joseph’s voice came back to me – not the content, which barely mattered, but the tone, the familiarity of it, the way it carried the same cold confidence he used whenever he believed he had already won.

He’s seeing someone very special…

As though he had been waiting for the opportunity to weaponize something that wasn’t his business to begin with. He had started a process he had no intention of seeing through or cleaning up after.

And Lisa would pay the price first. She always did, in one form or another, whenever my world collided with hers.

The thought tightened something in my chest that hadn’t loosened since last night. I stepped out onto the deck again, hoping the ocean air would steady me, but even the breeze felt wrong – too warm, too gentle. The waves rolled in with their usual rhythm, but instead of calming me, they made the villa feel even more isolated.

I paced the length of the deck, then stopped, my eyes drifting toward the bedroom. I couldn’t tell whether Lisa was asleep or simply refusing to move. Either possibility made my stomach twist. She looked so strong when she was fighting, when she was pushing back, when her eyes sparked with defiance. Seeing her folded inward like this, silent and unmoving, frightened me.

I tried to tell myself to give her time, that she needed stillness, that she needed space, that forcing conversation would only deepen the fracture. But every hour felt like an accusation, a reminder that I had somehow made everything worse by trying to fix it.

Eventually, the weight of all of it – Joseph’s interference, Priscilla’s poison, the headlines I couldn’t stop, the pregnancy she was facing alone despite my best efforts – grew too heavy to manage on my own. I felt the familiar pull toward the one person who had always steadied me, the one voice that could cut through noise and panic with gentle clarity.

That was when the idea of calling my mother finally surfaced.

By the time the sun dipped low enough to wash the villa in gold, I had already walked to the study at the back of the house. I closed the door behind me, sat on the edge of the desk, and stared at the phone for a long moment, my hand hovering just above the receiver.

I wasn’t sure what I was going to say.

I only knew that I needed someone who knew me beyond the stage, someone who understood the parts of me Lisa had seen, the parts that frightened me most now that she was slipping out of reach.

Finally, I picked up the receiver and dialed the number I’d memorized years ago.

My mother answered on the second ring.

“Hello?”

“Mother…”

“Michael?”

Her voice was soft, warm, the kind of warmth that made everything in me go painfully still.

“Baby… are you alright?”

And just like that, whatever distance I had been trying to maintain between myself and the truth dissolved.

“No,” I said quietly. “I’m not.”

I stayed in the study for a while after my mother’s voice faded from the receiver, letting the quiet settle around me. The room had a faint smell of old paper and warm wood, and the light filtering through the shutters painted thin, shifting stripes across the desk. I traced one absentmindedly with the tip of my finger, trying to steady myself. Mother hadn’t told me anything I didn’t already know; she had simply said it gently enough that I could finally admit the truth to myself.

Do right by her. Don’t let her face this alone.

I finally hung up the phone and just sat there, elbows on my knees, my head bowed in my hands. The house felt even quieter than before.

My mind drifted to the hallway, to the closed bedroom door, to the muffled silence behind it.

I could still hear Lisa’s voice in fragments from earlier – not the words in their entirety, but the tone she used with Priscilla, the sharp edges softened only by exhaustion. I had stood outside the room for far too long, listening without meaning to, forcing myself not to intervene even when every instinct in me pushed toward her defense. I had never been good at staying out of things where she was concerned, but she had asked me to give her space, and I had held myself still by sheer will.

Now the question pressed against my throat: was she ready to talk about any of it? Did she want me to ask? Did she want me to pretend I hadn’t heard the pain in her voice as she fought with her mother?

I wasn’t sure.

But I knew this wasn’t something I could leave unspoken.

I rose slowly from the desk, letting my hands fall to my sides, feeling a heaviness that had nothing to do with fatigue. The hallway seemed longer than it had that morning, each step carrying a kind of anticipation that bordered on dread. I paused at the bedroom doorway, fingers grazing the frame, and took one last breath before pushing it open.

The room was dim, washed in the gold of the sinking sun. Lisa was curled on her side, facing away from me. She hadn’t moved in hours, but the subtle lift of her shoulders told me she wasn’t asleep. Her hair spilled across the pillow, and the soft shimmer on her cheek caught the fading light in a way that pierced straight through me.

I crossed the room quietly and sat on the edge of the mattress, careful not to startle her.

“Lisa,” I said, my voice barely above a whisper.

She didn’t reply at first, but I saw the faint shift of her breathing, the subtle tension in her neck that told me she had been waiting for this in her own way.

I let a long moment pass before trying again.

“Are you awake?”

“Yes,” she murmured, without turning.

I hesitated, then reached out and let my fingertips rest lightly against her arm. She didn’t pull away, but she didn’t lean toward me either. It was a neutral acceptance, the kind that made my heart ache.

“I heard some of what your mother said,” I admitted quietly. “Not everything. I didn’t mean to. I just… I was close by, and I didn’t want to make things worse by stepping in.”

I swallowed. “If you want to talk about it… if you can… I want to understand.”

Her breath hitched in the faintest way, though her gaze remained fixed on the far wall.

“There’s nothing to talk about or understand,” she said, but there was no conviction in the words. “It was just her being her.”

“That didn’t sound like ‘just her’ to me,” I replied gently.

She flinched, just barely.

“She thinks she’s helping,” she said after a moment. “Or she thinks she’s stopping me from ruining my life. Or maybe she just doesn’t want to watch me make choices she would have never survived making.”

A humorless, brittle sigh escaped her. “It’s always some version of that.”

I inched closer.

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry she spoke to you like that. I’m sorry she hurt you.”

Lisa brought a hand up to her face, quietly wiping away a tear that had already dried.

“She didn’t hurt me. Not really. She just reminded me of everything I’ve spent years trying not to repeat.”

I felt the meaning of that down to my bones.

Fear. Legacy. Expectation. Love and control tangled together.

“Lise,” I said softly, “look at me.”

It took her a moment, but she shifted onto her back, then slowly turned her head toward me. Her eyes were swollen, rimmed pink, still shining faintly with tears she hadn’t let fall. She looked exhausted in a way that went deeper than the body.

Seeing her like that made something inside me resolve itself into certainty.

“Lisa Marie,” I began again, my voice low, steady, “I’ve been thinking. About today. About what your mother said. About the press. About the baby. About everything that’s coming, and how fast it’s coming.”

I paused, searching her face.

“I don’t want you facing any of this alone. And I don’t want you thinking for a second that I’m running from any part of it.”

Her throat tightened visibly, but she didn’t speak.

My hands shifted slightly, palms open, as though offering her something intangible.

“I want to do right by you. By both of you.”

Confusion flickered across her features, quickly followed by wariness.

“Michael… what are you-”

“Marry me.”

The words settled into the air between us with a quiet finality, not loud, not abrupt, just certain – though the certainty felt fragile the moment I saw her reaction. Her breath caught, her eyes widening in disbelief, and before I could read anything else, she shook her head.

“No,” she said softly, almost pleading, as though she needed me to understand before she had to justify it. “Michael… no.”

I leaned in, not to push, but because I needed her to see the truth in my face.

“Just listen-”

“No,” she repeated, firmer now, pushing herself up against the pillows. “I can’t. I won’t.”

Her fingers brushed her temples. “You’re not proposing because you want to marry me. You’re proposing because you think it’s the right thing to do. Or because she suggested it and you heard that part of the conversation. Or because you’re scared. I don’t know which one. But none of those reasons have anything to do with what I want.”

“That’s not true,” I said, though my voice wavered with the weight of everything she wasn’t wrong about.

“It is. You’re trying to fix something that isn’t broken yet. And I won’t be a solution you apply to a problem another person created.”

Her words struck with more precision than any blow.

“I’m not trying to fix you,” I whispered, frowning.

“I know you’re not,” she said softly, “but you’re trying to fix the situation. And it feels like you’re putting me in a box I never agreed to climb into.”

There was a fragile silence then, neither of us breathing quite right, both teetering on the edge of something irreversible.

“I think you should go,” she said finally, voice barely audible, as though even she feared the consequences of saying it aloud. “Go back home, Mike.”

Everything inside me recoiled, but I forced myself to nod, because love – whatever version of it we were approaching – sometimes meant stepping back even when every instinct screamed to stay.

“If that’s what you want,” I managed.

She didn’t respond, and she didn’t look at me again.

I stood, and for a moment I simply watched her, committing the curve of her shoulder, the tilt of her chin, the small rise and fall of her breath to memory. The last light of the day washed her in a muted gold that made the whole room look like a painting of a world I had already begun to lose.

Then I walked out, closing the door behind me with a softness that felt more like grief than courtesy.

Priscilla’s Mansion – Los Angeles. Present day.

Lisa

Priscilla’s house had always felt like a place constructed rather than lived in, a glamorous facade arranged to look effortless, with every cushion, every vase, every framed photograph placed with calculated intention. Without her here, the stillness was even more pronounced.

The air carried a chilled sort of perfection, the kind that made you constantly aware of where you stood and how you were being perceived. Her staff moved around me with muted steps and polite voices, pretending not to watch me while never fully taking their eyes off me. It was impossible not to feel monitored. Every glance, every hesitation, every whispered check-in was another quiet confirmation that my mother had asked them to keep track of my state, as if I were a volatile exhibit in her private museum.

I found myself sitting in the sunroom most afternoons, simply because the light felt kinder there. The chaise beneath me was soft enough to cradle the heaviness in my body, and the warmth from the windows soothed the deep, unfamiliar ache in my back.

Fourteen weeks. The thought came to me with a mixture of awe and disbelief. My stomach, once flat and unremarkable, now held a small but unmistakable curve, the first visible sign that the baby was growing quickly. My breasts felt fuller, sensitive in a way that made me move with a new, unintended slowness. Some days I had energy again; other days, my limbs dragged like I was wading through thick air. The nausea had mostly receded, but in its place came sharp little twinges along my abdomen whenever I shifted too quickly – round ligament pain, the doctor had said, perfectly normal.

I placed a hand over my stomach and let it rest there. Inside, a tiny body was forming reflexes, curling fingers, practicing the earliest version of frowning. A face was taking shape. A heartbeat was steady and strong. All of that was happening inside me while the world outside speculated with predatory enthusiasm about whether I had “gained weight for my first role in Hollywood” or was “hiding from the tabloids after a romantic getaway.”

The newspapers on the table confirmed what I had been trying to avoid all morning. Someone – almost certainly one of my mother’s assistants – had arranged them neatly beside my tea as if this were a casual reading selection instead of a calculated provocation. I knew I should have ignored them. Instead, my eyes caught the first headline in bold, theatrical block letters that seemed to pulse with eagerness.

PRESLEY & JACKSON: WHAT ARE THEY HIDING? Secret Maui escape stirs suspicion. Insiders note “visible changes” in Lisa Marie’s appearance.

Just beneath it, another paper leaned into the story with darker flourish:

THE KING’S DAUGHTER & THE MOONWALKER: A DANGEROUS CONNECTION? PR stunt or reckless romance? Experts debate Jackson’s motives.

I skimmed the opening paragraph, and my jaw tightened almost instantly.

The writer described Michael with an unsettling blend of fascination and contempt, calling him enigmatic, unpredictable and controversial, in that coded way journalists used when they meant not normal or not like us. They hinted at “erratic behaviors,” “mysterious medical changes,” “eccentric appearances,” threading the language with a tone I knew too well. It was meant to strip him of humanity, to turn him into an oddity that people could poke at safely from afar.

There was even a line that made my stomach turn:

Some psychologists suggest Jacko’s increasingly unusual physical transformation may reflect a deeper identity crisis, leaving him vulnerable to impulsive entanglements, especially with someone of Presley’s stature.

I read it twice, unable to believe the cruelty – starting from the heinous nickname.

They weren’t just questioning the relationship; they were calling him unstable, grotesque, something barely deserving of empathy. There was a racial undertone too, a whisper beneath the text suggesting his “otherness” made him unpredictable, even dangerous. It was subtle enough that many readers would miss it, but obvious enough to anyone who understood the way the media operated when they felt threatened by a Black man who had risen too high.

Another article framed our connection as a cynical performance, claiming that Michael was “engineering a narrative pivot” by aligning himself with “American royalty,” that he was “leveraging Presley mystique for his own reinvention.” They listed his past accomplishments as if they were blemishes, not triumphs. They mocked his soft voice, his shyness, his refusal to play the media’s game. They branded him calculating – the same man who could barely ask a woman out without apologizing six times first.

The final line struck me with particular cruelty:

If this is love, it certainly has the production budget for it: lights, angles, secrecy and a perfectly timed leak.

The implication was unmistakable: I was either a fool or a co-conspirator; he was a manipulator or a spectacle. And together, we were nothing but a circus act designed to distract the public.

I let the paper fall onto the table and closed my eyes for a moment, breathing through the sharp, unwelcome rush of anger spreading through my chest. I had expected the invasion, the speculation, even the moralizing about my choices. But what I hadn’t prepared for was the particular nastiness of their portrait of Michael, the way they reduced him to a sideshow, a freak, an unstable caricature dressed up in glitter. The man I knew was intelligent, gentle, thoughtful, vulnerable in ways he didn’t always understand. He was shy with strangers, tender with me, and so protective it sometimes took my breath away.

Seeing him targeted with the same venom the world had always reserved for people who scared them by refusing to fit their mold made something fierce rise in me. I felt an almost physical need to shield him, to counter their narrative with the truth of who he was and how deeply he cared. For the first time, I understood the urgency in his voice when he said he didn’t want me facing the world alone. Not because he saw me as fragile, but because he had tasted cruelty like this his entire life.

And now I was tasting it too, albeit tangentially.

I pushed the newspapers away and leaned back against the cushions, folding my legs beneath me to steady myself. I hadn’t left the house in days. Every time I approached a window, I saw flashes of movement outside: men lingering near the gates with long lenses, cars slowing as they passed, strangers pretending to check their bags while waiting for me to make a mistake and step onto the porch. The whole scene made my skin prickle. It wasn’t simply that they wanted information; it was that they wanted a breach, a flaw, a confirmation that the Presley girl had once again found a way to tarnish her legacy.

But beneath the claustrophobia and frustration, another sensation was quietly taking shape. It was an instinct I hadn’t recognized until now.

I wanted to protect him. Not in theory. Not abstractly.

I wanted to protect Michael the same way he had tried to protect me: instinctively, fiercely, without apology.

And once that realization surfaced, it refused to recede.

I leaned back against the chaise, letting the sunlight settle across my face, and my thoughts drifted to the villa in Maui, to the last night we were there, to the moment I asked Michael to leave. The memory came with an ache so sharp it almost took my breath away. If I closed my eyes, I could still see the look on his face: hurt, bewildered, struggling to understand something I wasn’t ready to articulate.

What surprised me most was how often I replayed the moment he asked me to marry him. His expression had been earnest, shaken, hopeful in a way that made me want to both hold him and run from him. I had felt the sincerity behind his offer, but I had also felt the fear, the urgency, the weight of everything that had happened that day. He wasn’t asking because he woke up wanting to build a life with me. He was asking because the world had cornered us and he didn’t know any other way to shield me.

Still, if I was being painfully honest, a small part of me – a part I wished I could uproot – had wanted to say yes. Not out of panic or self-protection, and not because of the baby, but because something in me responded to the steadiness in him, the way he kept reaching for me even when I was pushing him away. That faint longing was the most terrifying part of all, because it had arrived uninvited and refused to leave.

Eventually, the silence in the house became too heavy to sit with, and the need to hear his voice rose in me with a kind of quiet desperation. Before I could talk myself out of it, I reached for the phone.

He answered almost immediately, and the warmth in his voice made every muscle in my body loosen.

“Lisa?”

That single word softened me more than I wanted to admit.

“I just wanted to check in,” I said, trying for casual and failing. “See how you’re doing.”

There was a pause, not long, but long enough for me to feel the weight of everything unspoken between us.

“I’m alright,” he said gently. “Doing my best to keep myself busy. And of course, I’ve been thinking about you.”

The quiet sincerity of it hit me harder than anything I had read today. I leaned back into the chaise, closing my eyes as if that could steady the sudden rush of feeling.

Before I could lose my nerve, I asked, “Have you seen the headlines?”

His answer came without hesitation. “No.”

I expected defensiveness or deflection. Instead, his voice was level, almost resigned.

“I never do. Not anymore. They don’t tell the truth about me… or about anyone. And they’re designed to hurt. So I don’t let them.”

It wasn’t said with bitterness, just experience. A lifetime of it. And probably for the first time, I felt the full weight of what it meant for him to move through the world being treated as spectacle, myth, anomaly, anything but a person. The articles I’d read this morning had horrified me. He had been enduring versions of those for years.

“I understand why,” I murmured. “After today… I really do.”

There was a soft inhale on the line, almost as if my acknowledgment meant more to him than he expected.

He asked how I was feeling, and for once I didn’t hide anything. I told him about my breasts aching unpredictably, about the sudden bursts of hunger, about the heavy waves of fatigue that made me want to sleep for days. I told him how the doctor said the baby was moving constantly, though I still couldn’t feel it yet. He listened as though he were memorizing every detail, his questions gentle, attentive, full of wonder that felt almost reverent.

“I wish I could be there,” he said after a moment, his voice low and unguarded. “I wish I could see you… see everything that’s happening. Live it with you. It feels like I’m missing something I’ll never get back.”

The vulnerability in those words reached somewhere deep and unsteady inside me. I could picture him perfectly, sitting in his Century City apartment, curtain-filtered sunlight behind him, hands fidgeting, eyes full of something raw and earnest. There was no performance in it, no strategy; just longing. Simple, human longing.

“I know,” I whispered. “I want that too. I just need some time. I need to find my footing.”

Even as I said it, something inside me tightened. I wasn’t only protecting myself from the press or my mother or the weight of the pregnancy; I was keeping him at a distance too, and hearing how much he wanted to be part of this, how much he cared, sparked a guilty twist in my stomach.

He wasn’t pretending. He wasn’t standing on ceremony or offering duty dressed up as devotion. He truly wanted this baby. And he wanted to share these weeks with me, not as an obligation, but because something in him had already begun to attach.

“I understand,” he said, though there was a hint of sadness beneath the composure, the kind that made my heart pull tight. “Just… please don’t disappear on me again. I hate it, Lise.”

The plea was soft, stripped of anything manipulative, and it disarmed me completely. It made me realize how much my silence had wounded him, how deeply he feared being shut out. He wasn’t asking for control; he was asking not to be abandoned in a story we were both caught inside.

“I’m not trying to disappear,” I said quietly. The apology lived between the words even if I didn’t speak it outright. “And I’m not trying to keep you out of any of this. You’re not someone I would ever punish for this. I just need to feel like I can breathe again. Like I’m not drowning.”

There was a long inhale, soft but full of relief.

“I know,” he murmured. “I just needed to hear you say it.”

We rested in the quiet for a moment, not speaking, just listening to each other breathe through the distance.

“I miss you. I really do,” he said finally.

The words weren’t dramatic or embellished; they were simple, true, and they reached into me with a precision that left no room for denial. Something inside me warmed, unfurled, a feeling I had been trying to ignore since the moment he walked out of that Maui bedroom looking like I had taken the earth out from under him.

“I miss you too,” I said softly. It felt like peeling back a layer of armor I didn’t realize I was still wearing. “More than I expected.”

There was silence after that. Gentle, astonished, alive.

When we finally hung up, I sat there with the receiver resting against my leg, the world outside the window blurring into sunlight and shadow. My body felt warm and restless, aware in a way that had nothing to do with pregnancy symptoms. I touched my stomach again, slowly, the gesture instinctive rather than protective, and felt a wave of emotion wash through me.

I missed him.

I missed the steadiness of him, the tenderness, the way he looked at me as though I mattered in ways that had nothing to do with legacy or headlines. And under that longing, beneath the fear and confusion and exhaustion, a single question rose inside me with quiet force.

How did I really feel about him? With the pregnancy, without the pregnancy, beyond the pregnancy?

The answer no longer felt simple.