His Brother's Ex, His Unborn Child

Chapter 8

ELENA

I didn't sleep.

I lay in the dark beside Liam and listened to him breathe and thought about what Nicholas said over and over until the words lost their shape and became just sounds.

I still couldn't find the meaning inside them.

One night.

What night? When? I had never met Nicholas Carter before this evening. I had never been in the same room as him. I had done nothing, said nothing or given him no reason for the contempt that had been in his eyes every time he looked at me tonight.

And yet, he had looked at me like he knew something about me.

Like he had already decided what I was.

At four in the morning, I gave up on sleep. I went to the kitchen and made tea. I sat at the counter in the dark.

Liam slept on. He always slept well and I had noticed that about him in the early years.

Now I just thought it spoke to a man who had arranged his interior life so that very little could disturb it.

I drank my tea then went back to bed.

I did not find what I was looking for.

**

The coffee hit me wrong one morning.

I lifted my mug and the smell reached me before the rim reached my lips. It was rich and dark. Faintly burnt the way the gallery's espresso machine always ran and my stomach turned over with a swift decisive violence that had nothing to do with hunger.

I set the mug down.

Petra looked up from the shipping manifest.

"You okay?"

"Fine," I said. "The machine needs cleaning."

She glanced at the espresso machine and said nothing.

I went into my office and closed the door.

Stress, I told myself. Residual disruption. A body that had been through something and hadn't finished processing it.

The fatigue arrived next.

It's the not same feeling I had managed for years on gallery opening schedules and late acquisition trips. It's something different in quality. It was heavier and more patient.

It's the kind that sat behind my eyes and in the hinges of my knees.

I didn't respond to coffee or sleep or the green juice Isla kept recommending. It just existed and waiting.

I noticed it worst on Thursday during the Reyes installation walkthrough.

Marco was particular about light and walkthroughs with him required a presence I usually gave without effort. That Thursday, he was explaining the relationship between the third panel and the east window and somewhere in the middle of his second sentence the room tilted slightly on its axis.

I put my hand on the wall.

"Elena." Marco stopped. "You look pale."

"I didn't sleep well." I straightened. Smiled. "The angle, Marco."

He let it go. I finished the walkthrough and said goodbye at the elevator with the full competence of a woman who was absolutely fine. I sat in my office for twenty minutes with my eyes closed and my head tipped back against the chair, counting my own breathing.

On Friday morning, Liam noticed.

He appeared in the bathroom doorway in his shirt and half-knotted tie. He had a coffee in hand, and looked at me in the mirror.

"You're pale," he said.

"Good morning to you too."

"Seriously. You look like you haven't slept in a week."

"I've been sleeping fine." I set down the concealer. "I might have a bug."

He frowned. "Let me call Dr. Harmon. He can be here before your first—"

"I'll go to the clinic."

"Elena, Harmon is twenty minutes away—"

"I'll go to the clinic."

I picked up the concealer again, which was as close as I got to ending a conversation.

"Thank you, Liam."

He looked at me in the mirror for a moment longer. Then he finished his tie and left for work.

I stood alone at the bathroom mirror and did the math.

**

I bought the test at a pharmacy three blocks from the gallery.

I tucked it between a bottle of vitamins and a travel-size ibuprofen so it looked like an errand rather than a reckoning. The woman at the register didn't look at me. I walked back to the gallery in the cold October air.

I took it on my lunch break in the private bathroom adjoining my office. It's the one I rarely used for anything except changing before evening events.

I set it on the edge of the sink.

I looked at myself in the mirror while I waited.

Thirty seconds.

I looked at the test.

Then looked at it for a long time.

I put it in my coat pocket and washed my hands. I went back to my desk and called Petra to reschedule my two o'clock and sat very still in my chair.

I stared at the wall.

The Reyes installation was doing something extraordinary with the afternoon light through the east window. I had hung it specifically for that reason.

I had known from the moment I saw the piece in the artist's studio that it needed east light in the afternoon to do what it was capable of doing.

I looked at it now and felt nothing about it at all.

**

The clinic on 54th was quiet on a Friday afternoon.

I had chosen it. I didn't want the Carter family physician and not the GP I had been seeing since the marriage.

I do not anyone whose first call after an appointment might be to someone I knew.

This is a private clinic. It has a receptionist who asked for my name and insurance and nothing else.

The doctor was a woman in her late forties with efficient hands and an unhurried manner. She asked the standard questions and I answered them in order.

She sent me to the lab and I sat in the waiting room with a magazine I didn't read.

The nurse finally called my name.

The doctor sat across from me with the results between us and folded her hands.

"You're pregnant, Mrs. Carter. Approximately four weeks."

I looked at her hands.

"I need to tell you something important." Her voice was careful. "Based on your examination and your medical history, this pregnancy is — exceptional. Your circumstances make conceiving naturally quite rare."

I looked up.

"If this pregnancy is not carried to term," she said, "the likelihood of conceiving again is very low. I want you to understand that before you leave this room."

The clinic continued around us. Someone laughed in the corridor. A phone rang twice and stopped. The ordinary sounds of an afternoon entirely unaware that something had just rearranged itself permanently inside this room.

"Do you have any questions?" she asked.

I had a thousand questions. Not one of them was something this woman could answer.

"No," I said. "Thank you."

She gave me a leaflet and a referral. I folded them into my bag and shook her hand then walked out through the waiting room and through the glass door. The afternoon had gone grey and cold while I was inside.

I stood on the pavement.

Four weeks.

I pressed my hand flat against my coat — just below my ribs.

Something was there.

Smaller than a word. Quieter than a feeling.

I hailed a cab and got in and gave my address and sat in the back with the city moving past the window. My hand still flat against my coat.

My only chance.

If I lost this I would never have another.