Chapter 5
April
Madison Square Park is one of those rare spots in Manhattan that lets you believe, for five seconds, that the world isn’t falling apart around you.
Trees sway above in the autumn midday light, pretending they’re not about to shed the last of their leaves and turn bare for the winter.
Pigeons swarm like tiny sociopaths around an old man throwing birdseed, and somewhere nearby, a street musician is singing Sinatra off-key.
It’s too cold for a picnic, but I needed air and movement and food to distract me from the psychotic conversation I’d had with Anthony, if it could even be called a conversation.
Nicky sits on a bench opposite the fountain, two coffees in a cardboard carrier beside her.
Her long camel trench looks slightly too light for the weather, but she’s always been a fan of the chillier days and loathes the heat, so it’s not a surprise.
She pushes her sunglasses up onto her head, her black hair fanning back from her face, and grins at me as she raises a small brown bag that I recognize immediately.
Pastries.
“You’re the best,” I groan, sinking down beside her on the bench and snatching up my coffee before reaching into the bag. I pull out a chocolate croissant, and nearly cry from just how perfect that pick-me-up is.
She snatches it back. “Nope, nuh-uh,” she smirks. “You get your pastry when you tell me what happened between you and the Ice King.”
I roll my eyes and slump back against the bench.
“Clearly, the apocalypse is upon us, so spill.”
“Can’t I just have my snack first?”
“Are you a child?”
“Ugh. Fine. Fine. So I went in this morning like you said to do,” I start, picking at the skin beside my thumbnail.
She’d talked me down for an hour last night after the initial panic, and I’m still indebted to her, but the thought of recounting what happened in Anthony’s office makes me want to crawl out of my goddamn skin.
“I thought I was going to be fired. I was convinced. I was a fucking mess, but I did it.”
“Right, I figured as much, but come on.”
“I got in there and the door to his office was already open. I definitely shut it when I left yesterday. He did that on purpose.”
“Is that a problem?”
“He let me think I’d have a second to breathe without him watching me when I didn’t.”
She rolls her eyes and takes a sip of her drink. The scent of it carries on the breeze, some kind of lavender thing that I don’t understand. “Classic Bond villain shit. But that can’t be all of it.”
“I just… I thought it’d be a scolding, or he’d fire me on the spot, or we’d sign some kind of dumb NDA to never talk about it again. But it… It wasn’t any of those,” I exhale. “He offered me a deal.”
Her brows knit as she turns to look at me. “What kind of deal?”
I bite down on my bottom lip.
“April.”
“He… he needs an heir,” I say, the words raspy, the first time I’ve actually spoken them out loud since I stormed out two hours ago.
“A child. Something about a family trust. I didn’t catch all of it because I was obviously too busy going into cardiac arrest, but the gist was that he doesn’t want a wife or a relationship or whatever, he just wants someone to… fuck, I don’t know, carry his kid?”
Nicky’s eyes go wide, her brows raising up into her hairline. “You mean you? He wants you to carry his baby?” I pull my glasses off and rub a hand over my face. “Yeah.”
“Jesus fucking—April, no, what?” She leans back on the bench, blinking at me like I’ve grown a second head.
“I walked out,” I continue. “Didn’t let him explain much more. I was… freaked out. Obviously. But he said he’d let me keep my job if I helped him with this.”
“This feels like the plot of a lifetime movie or a really weird porn movie.”
“Yeah, yeah, whatever,” I sigh. I take a sip of my coffee, thanking her with my eyes for the salvation, before lowering it again.
“He didn’t say anything about a clinic or IVF or whatever, and he said that I fit the criteria, so unless I misunderstood, which I’m positive I didn’t, it wouldn’t just be his baby. ”
“This is insane. You’d be the mother?”
“I guess?”
“Shit.”
We sit in silence for too long, the weight of it pressing down in the air.
The city keeps moving around us—dogs yapping, kids shrieking, horns honking, office workers speed-walking through their lunch hours like they’re late to just existing, and I’m sitting in the center of it with her, paused and confused.
And tempted.
“Would you even be able to give it up if that’s what he wanted?” she asks, her voice smaller now. “If it’s yours?”
I shake my head. “I don’t know. I don’t think he’s thought that far ahead, either. It’s like he sees people based on how functional they are, not how they’d feel about things. He needs a body, and I’m a… body.”
Her lip curls slightly in irritation. “You’re a hell of a lot more than that.”
“I don’t feel like it,” I mutter, taking another sip of my latte.
“You told him to fuck off, right?”
I shrug. “Kind of? I walked out. I don’t know what that means for me in terms of my job. I don’t know—no.”
“No, what?”
I groan and scrub at my face again, trying to shake the bitter feeling or the wanting feeling or both, I’m not sure. “It’s insane. I get that. But he offered benefits. Payment. Security.”
She whistles, low and slow, leaning back from me to take it all in. “I mean, I’d hope he pays you. But you’re not doing it. That’s insane.”
We both fall into an awkward silence, our eyes locked, my cheeks a little too warm for the cold air.
“April.”
“I’m not—”
“Oh my god, you’re considering it.”
“Shut up,” I mutter. “I just, you know, I could use the money, I could help Angela, I could ask for enough to pay off Ava’s medical costs, I could fix so many things.”
She scoffs, but it’s light, not nearly as judgmental as I was expecting. “You’d need therapy.”
I snort. “I’d make him cover that too.”
“Good god almighty in heaven, I cannot believe you’re actually considering this,” she says, her lips tipping up at the corner like we’ve shifted from scary life stories to gossiping.
“Let’s say, theoretically, that you agreed.
You’d have to be clear with yourself. You can’t catch fucking feelings if Anthony is expecting you not to marry him or have a relationship with him. You can’t romanticize this.”
“I’m already romanticizing it,” I groan, covering my face with my coffee cup to hide. “And he knows damn well how badly I want him to touch me, now, so it’s not like I can pretend that’s not the case.”
She shakes her head. “If you do it, you’ve got to do it for your sister and your niece. That’s it. Not because you want him to rip your stockings or whatever the hell else you rambled down the phone last night.”
“Yeah. Yeah, I know,” I sigh. I try to focus on the heat coming from the coffee cup, the way it warms my hand, instead of the horror show of today.
“I don’t know if I can fully separate it.
He drives me insane, but he’s also… he’s too much.
Intense. Controlled. Ridiculously hot. And wants me, of all people, to solve his business problem by being a walking incubator. ”
“You’d have to stay detached. Just your body, nothing else. Don’t fuck him, do it at a clinic, all that jazz.”
I glance at her. “I’ll just end up being a rented womb with editing skills.”
She pinches the bridge of her nose. “Maybe. I don’t know, babe, if you go down this road, you’re going to need all the help you can get. You’ll need to be ready to walk away from both of them, him and the baby, when it’s done. Can you even do that?”
I turn my gaze to the trees, to the kids playing across the way on a chalk-drawn hopscotch course, my head buzzing at that. I hadn’t considered the end of it. “I don’t know.”
“You might have to. And that means you need to know exactly what you’re walking into. So maybe ask him.”
The idea of that, of asking him, of talking to him, sets me so on edge I can barely breathe.
How the hell am I supposed to do this? And what if I’ve already let myself go too far?