Chapter Six
S HE TEXTED HIM . Just one time. Two days after they met.
He didn’t text her back.
Her brain spun scenarios about why this was happening.
That something happened to him on the way home from the hotel? Had he been hit by a taxi?
She was embarrassed to admit she had done a combination of Google searches trying to find out if a man had been killed in that area. Or been in some kind of horrible accident. Because the alternatives weren’t… worse per se, but they were painful in a different way.
What if all he had wanted was to lure her into a sexual encounter?
Well. That didn’t make sense. They had been texting for nearly six months. She was the one who had suggested they meet. If he had only wanted sex there was no reason for them to text that long, and he would’ve suggested a meetup long before.
She reminded herself that she had been in the driver’s seat, and it did something to quell the heartbroken feeling that she was grappling with.
She had sensed that there was something off with him emotionally. And she felt like maybe he was imbalanced after their encounter. But because of that she thought that he might break and eventually text, but he didn’t.
She had never felt this kind of heartbreak. She had experienced it in other ways. Her mother broke her heart routinely.
Her father’s death had been heartbreaking.
The initial stutter and stumble of the publishing house had been heartbreaking.
This was different. This felt like constantly breathing with a jagged piece of glass embedded in her chest.
It was ridiculous. But she missed him. She had no one to talk to. And as the acquisition of the company ramped up, that became more and more difficult.
She stared at her phone so often, wishing that she was brave enough to make an overture. She just wasn’t.
The first time Christos Onassis came into the office after she had been ghosted, she had nearly fallen over where she was standing. She hadn’t remembered how much of an impact he made, and that was ridiculous because she had just seen him a few days earlier.
But there was something different. Or maybe it was something different in her.
She hated that. But suddenly, she realized that the impact of him wasn’t just based on the anxiety she was feeling about the role he was playing in this difficult season of her life, but her new understanding of what a man who looked like him could do with a body like that.
She hated that she would even think that in connection with this man that she hated so much.
She distanced herself as best she could because she wasn’t really being included in any of this. The contract was sent over to her, and she surrounded herself with legal representation and worked at figuring out exactly what her best options were.
One month turned into two, which turned into nearly three, and then she started to feel nauseous in the morning.
She really hadn’t thought much about anything other than the great implosions happening around her.
How much she missed Baby, how much she hated Christos.
How stressed out she was by everything. But when she got out of bed, ran straight to the bathroom and threw up, she had the realization that she hadn’t actually had her period for way too long.
What an idiot she was. She had just been consumed by all the misery that she was dealing with, so she hadn’t been tracking. She hadn’t been paying attention.
She sat down on the edge of her bed and put a hand on her stomach.
She didn’t have time for this. She didn’t have time to be sick, she didn’t have time to deal with this.
She had to get to work. There was literally a final meeting today with Christos.
And they had to sign paperwork. And she hated him.
She rallied and finished getting ready. She couldn’t look as bedraggled as she felt.
She had to get it together.
She walked out of her apartment and popped into the bodega, grabbing a pregnancy test and taking it to the counter, trying not to feel self-conscious or embarrassed as she purchased it.
The man barely looked at her; he just ran her card.
She accepted the offer of a small bag and tucked it into her larger bag. She was going to have to take the test when she had a break. And then what? Text the man who had ghosted her? Well, she would have to.
Because she had to at least give him a chance to engage with this.
She supposed.
She realized that she was oddly numb. She was going through the motions of taking care of this, but it wasn’t…it wasn’t penetrating. It wasn’t sinking in. But there was no point making it real until she knew for sure if it was.
She could not deal with this right now. Her life was imploding.
In every way.
But they hadn’t used a condom. Something she hadn’t been fully conscious of until afterward.
It was just…everything had happened so fast, and she had been so aroused. So shrouded by fantasy. But she hadn’t really thought that one time…
Truthfully, she had just put it all out of her mind. It had been completely hijacked by all of the work stuff, by all of the emotional upheaval that had come with it.
The potential odds of getting pregnant from one sexual encounter had not been at the forefront of her mind.
More fool her.
By the time she got to her office her hands were shaking.
Christos would be in soon.
She had about twenty minutes to deal with this.
She curled her fingers into fists, gathered herself up and went into the bathroom, locking the door securely behind her.
She took the pregnancy test out of the bag and took the plastic off the box with shaking fingers.
She opened it up, only to find a difficult foil packet ensconced the test itself.
She pierced it with a key that was down at the bottom of her bag before tearing it open.
Then she read the instructions and followed them.
And waited.
Her heart was thundering so hard she thought she might pass out.
And when one faint pink line appeared, followed by another, she felt her whole world tilt.
No.
She couldn’t…
The meeting was now in ten minutes.
She picked up her phone.
It had been months since they had contacted each other, he wasn’t in the scroll of texts anymore. Her phone off-loaded messages after thirty days.
She picked it up, typed in Baby . And there he was.
She had resisted contacting him again all this time. She swallowed hard, her throat dry.
Kid: I need to meet with you. Today. No anonymity. It’s an emergency.
What would he think about that? Would he question it?
There was no response. She walked out of the bathroom and went back to her office. She was sweating. She felt like screaming. Like throwing things across the room. Like having a literal breakdown because everything was coming down around her all at once. And she had to keep going.
She didn’t have anyone to call for moral support. Her mother would simply laugh and give her the card for a trusted clinic. There would be no discussion. There would be no heart-to-heart. And worst of all, no place for Sylvie to try to reason out what her own feelings were.
But then, with her mother, her feelings had never mattered.
That was the example that Sylvie had for motherhood.
How was she supposed to…be a mother herself?
She looked down at her phone, right as a message popped up on the screen.
Baby: We can’t meet.
Kid: We have to.
She hadn’t intended to tell him that she was pregnant over text. She only had two minutes until the meeting.
Baby: There is no “have to.” This is over.
Kid: Do you think that I have so little pride that I’m texting you because I want to keep sleeping with you? That isn’t why, you bastard.
That had been a little bit excessive. She was angry. She had trusted this man. She had slept with him. She had given him her body, and now she was pregnant with his baby, and he was acting like the one thing that might motivate her was a desperate need for him to…love her.
If only that was her one issue. If only .
Kid: I’m pregnant.
There was no response.
She had to go to the meeting.
She picked her phone up and tried to collect herself as she walked into the hall.
Baby: I’m unavailable for the next hour. I can meet you after.
Kid: I’m not available for the next hour either. We can meet at Rosie’s, on Sixth.
Baby: Fine. I’m near there.
That made her frown.
Kid: Okay.
Just then, the elevator doors opened, and Christos stepped out, dressed all in black.
Her anxiety wrapped its hands around her throat and forced her stomach to plummet.
She hated that he was tied up in all this. She hated him. She might hate everybody. The company was against her, her mother was against her, the one man that she had trusted seemed to be against her now, and then there was this idiot.
This fool that she had to deal with because he had decided that he was going to target Jones & Abbott.
And there was no negotiating with him. The best-case scenario was that he kept her on in her position to continue the day-to-day operations uninterrupted.
But that was literally all she was working for.
It was no longer going to be what it had been.
It was no longer going to matter in the way that it had. It was going to be his.
Did she even want to fight to keep her job? She was going to have a baby.
She was going to potentially be a totally single mother doing this all on her own.
Well. She might not have a good example in the form of a mother, but her father had been an excellent single father. Who had done his very best to clean up whatever disarray her mother had left her in routinely when they had spent time together—times few and far between.
She knew that a parent doing it on their own could make an immense amount of difference.
So she went. And she wasn’t in the mood to be nice.
Because she wasn’t fighting for this job anymore.
She was fighting for herself. She was fighting for her baby.
They walked into the boardroom.