2
1133 Words
Becky
I didn't sleep that night. I sat in the chair beside Micah's hospital bed and watched the numbers on his monitor blink in the dark, and my mind kept sliding backward, five years, to a night I'd spent a long time trying to forget.
I was twenty-four then, working two jobs and drowning in both of them, and my roommate had dragged me to a bar downtown for her birthday. I hadn't wanted to go. I remember that clearly, how tired I'd been, how close I'd come to staying home. But she'd begged, and I'd put on the one dress I owned that didn't have a coffee stain somewhere on it, and I'd gone.
He was at the end of the bar, alone, in a gray suit that looked like it cost more than my rent. I noticed him before he noticed me, the way you notice someone who seems to belong in a different, shinier world than the one you're standing in. When he finally looked over and smiled, I remember thinking he had the kind of face you saw in magazines, not the kind that talked to girls like me.
His name was Adrian. That was all I really knew about him by the end of the night. He didn't talk about work, or family, or where he was from. He asked about me instead, actually asked, and listened like my answers mattered. We talked for hours before anything else happened, about nothing important, about music and bad childhood memories and the kind of things you only tell a stranger because you know you'll never have to face them again in daylight.
In the morning he was gone before I woke up. No note, no number, nothing but the shape of him still pressed into the other pillow. I told myself it didn't matter. One night, no names exchanged beyond a first one, no way to find him even if I'd wanted to. I went back to my life, back to my two jobs, and three weeks later I found out I was pregnant.
I never tried to find him. What was I going to do, walk into every bar in the city holding up a picture I didn't have? I didn't even know his last name. So I raised Micah alone, and most days I didn't think about Adrian at all, and the days I did, I told myself it didn't matter because we were fine, just the two of us, we were fine.
We weren't fine anymore.
The doctor's question sat in my chest like a stone. Family history and additional support. I'd asked her directly, once Micah drifted back to sleep and we stepped into the hallway, what she meant by that, and her answer had made my knees go weak.
"In some leukemia cases, if chemotherapy alone doesn't achieve remission, a bone marrow transplant becomes necessary," she'd said. "A sibling is often the best match, but a parent can sometimes be a partial match, and any biological family member widens the pool of options we can test. I know this is difficult to hear right now. I just want you to understand every avenue we have available to us."
Every avenue. As if I had more than one.
So at four in the morning, sitting in a stiff hospital chair with my phone brightness turned all the way down so it wouldn't wake Micah, I typed the only three things I knew about the father of my son into a search bar. Adrian. Bar downtown. Five years ago.
Nothing useful came up, of course. I hadn't expected it to. But I remembered something else, a detail so small I'd almost forgotten I still had it. That night, before he left, he'd borrowed my phone to call himself a car, and his number had stayed in my call log for exactly one day before I deleted it in a fit of embarrassment I didn't fully understand at the time. But I remembered the area code. Northridge. He'd mentioned once, briefly, that he'd grown up nearby.
It wasn't much. But at four in the morning with my son hooked up to machines twelve feet away from me, it was enough to start.
I searched Adrian, Northridge. Then Adrian CEO Northridge, because something about the way he'd carried himself that night, the watch on his wrist, the way the bartender had known his name without asking, told me he wasn't just anybody. I don't know what made me add the word billionaire. Maybe some instinct I didn't want to name. But when I did, the first result stopped my breath in my throat.
Adrian Blackwood. Founder and CEO of Blackwood Dynamics. Thirty-one years old. A profile photo of a man in a dark suit, older now, harder around the jaw, but unmistakably him. The same eyes that had listened to me talk for hours in a bar five years ago. The same face that had disappeared before sunrise and left me to figure out the rest of my life on my own.
I read everything I could find in the next hour. Articles about a technology empire he'd built from nothing, about a company now worth more money than I could picture as a real number. Photos of him at galas, at conferences, once on the cover of a business magazine with a headline calling him one of the youngest self-made billionaires in the country.
My son was lying in a hospital bed because I didn't have insurance, because I worked a job that paid barely enough to keep our lights on, and his father was one of the richest men in the state.
I didn't cry this time. I just sat there, staring at his picture until the screen went dark on its own, and something hard and determined settled into my chest where the fear had been sitting all night.
By the time visiting hours allowed it, I'd already looked up the address of Blackwood Dynamics downtown. I told the nurse I needed to step out for an hour, that my sister was coming to sit with Micah, a lie that came out of me so smoothly it scared me a little. Then I took three buses across the city in the clothes I'd slept in, my hands shaking the whole way, until I was standing on the sidewalk outside a glass tower forty stories tall, staring up at a building that seemed to swallow the whole sky.
My legs wouldn't move. My whole body was trembling, and I couldn't tell anymore if it was fear or fury or five years of exhaustion finally catching up to me all at once.
I just stood there, shaking, staring up at his name etched in steel above the door.
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