Chapter 3 #2
Something inside me died then. Not when I saw the kiss.
Not when I heard about the foundation. Not when I shook Nikki’s hand.
It died on that staircase, among smoke and strangers’ elbows, when my husband almost remembered for half a second that I existed and then decided it was more convenient to forget.
A stranger in a crew uniform pulled me out of the crush.
"Hold on to me!" he shouted, and without thinking I clutched his sleeve, clutched the living help of a stranger, because sometimes the person who saves you is not the one who promised, but the one who happens to be there and does not stop to calculate the benefit.
He forced a path upward and onto the open deck, where the cold struck my face so sharply I began to cough.
The night was black and wet, filled with wind, screams, smoke, and the trembling lights along the shore, which looked impossibly far away.
The yacht was listing more steeply now. A thin film of water raced across the deck beneath my feet, as though the river were already tasting us with its tongue.
The deck became true hell, at first without flames, because the people were more terrifying than the fire.
Orange life jackets were handed out too slowly.
People tore them away from each other and fought over them.
Someone tried to put on two at once. Someone else screamed that he had a child when there was no child anywhere near him.
Two of Adrian’s guards stood on the starboard side, shoving the crowd away from the passage to the lifeboats.
I spotted Adrian almost immediately. He was by the rail with Nikki, Kyle, and several others.
In the red light, his white shirt looked stained with sunset.
His hair was disheveled, and a scratch stood out on his cheekbone.
Even then he looked so beautiful that my stupid, treacherous, aching heart contracted for one instant not only with hatred, but with love.
There he was. Alive. Unhurt. Mine. Not mine.
Never mine again. I took a step toward him, and a female crew member thrust a life jacket into my hands.
"Put this on immediately! Hurry! Fasten it here and here, do you hear me?"
Soot covered her face, and her eyes were enormous.
She was no longer choosing whom to save.
She was simply saving people for as long as she could.
I pressed the life jacket to my chest, and the coarse orange material felt heavier than stone.
Salvation has weight. Apparently, it smells like rubber and strangers’ hands.
I should have put it on at once. I should have fastened the straps, found a place by the rail, followed instructions, and thought of my child, only my child.
But I saw Nikki trembling against Adrian without a life jacket, and I saw him scanning the deck, searching, demanding with his eyes that the world immediately provide whatever he needed.
I knew that look. It was how he looked at a waiter when his coffee arrived cold.
At an attorney when a document was not ready.
At me when another test showed only one line.
The world was required to correct itself because Adrian Mercer wanted something.
And when his gaze landed on the life jacket in my hands, I understood everything before he took his first step.
Understood so clearly that my body tightened in anticipation, my fingers dug into the material, and my mouth went as dry as it did after screaming.
He was walking toward me. Not toward me, toward the life jacket.
Between us lay several yards, several years of marriage, and the one life I was still carrying inside me.
"Lana," he said, his voice level, businesslike, almost calm amid the chaos. "Give me the life jacket."
I clutched it tighter. The deck rocked. Somewhere nearby, a woman dropped to her knees and wailed, but I could not take my eyes off Adrian. The wind lashed my face, and tears streamed freely now, no longer from crying, but from the smoke, the cold, everything at once.
"What?" I asked, though I had heard him perfectly. Nikki stood behind his shoulder, white-faced, furious, terrified. My watch was still on her wrist, counting down a time in which there seemed to be no place left for me.
"The life jacket, Lana. Now. She can’t go into the water.
She’s pregnant," Adrian said. Just like that.
No request. No explanation. Not a tremor in his voice.
She could not go in the water. Which meant I could.
I was always allowed to suffer, stay silent, sign, wait, smile, leave the bedroom, keep up appearances, step aside, give up my life.
I heard myself laugh, a soft, wrong, almost deranged sound.
"And what am I, Adrian? Scenery? Ballast? An unbudgeted expense?"
His eyes darkened.
"Don’t make a scene."
"A scene?"
I stepped closer, and the life jacket became an orange boundary between us, the last thing he had not yet taken from me.
"You paraded your mistress onto a stage, forced me to congratulate her on her baby, your mother discussed having me declared a penniless lunatic, and now you’re telling me not to make a scene? Darling, you have a gift. You could sell gasoline to people already on fire."
Nikki cried out:
"She’s insane!"
Adrian did not even look at her. He was looking at my hands. At the life jacket. At survival.
"Lana, this isn’t about us right now."
"Then who is it about?" I asked. "Her? The child she’s carrying? Your foundation? The cameras that I hope are still recording what a noble man you are?"
His face hardened.
"Her pregnancy is high-risk."
"So is mine," I said.
The words escaped nothing like the way I had dreamed they would that morning.
Not in golden light, not with a little box, not with a smile, not with his hand on my stomach.
They flew out onto the wet deck, into the smoke, wind, and roar of human voices, like a bird with a broken wing.
Adrian went still. Truly still. Nikki stopped breathing.
Even Kyle, standing off to the side, lifted his head.
I could feel my heart beating at the base of my throat, huge and exposed.
"I’m pregnant, Adrian. I found out today. The test is in my clutch. I was going to tell you tonight. Before I saw your latest charitable venture perched on the edge of your desk."
He stared at me, and this time something alive flashed in his eyes, something so sharp and painful that I almost believed.
Now. Now he would wake up. Now he would come to me.
Now everything that had happened would become a nightmare, and he would choose me after all.
But Nikki struck first. Not with her hand. With her voice.
"She’s lying!" she screamed, clutching Adrian’s sleeve. "She’s lying, Adrian! You said it yourself, she can’t! You said the doctors confirmed it! She just doesn’t want to give it up! She’s always clung to you. Always!"
You said it yourself.
The words were a small shard driven so deep beneath my skin that I did not feel the pain at first. So he had told her.
Somewhere in a bed, an office, a restaurant, a car, he had told another woman about my body, my diagnosis, my emptiness.
He had given her the part of me that was most shameful, most wounded, most haunted by darkness.
I stood before him with a life jacket in my hands, pregnant, soaked in spray and sweat, and suddenly felt more naked than if my dress had been ripped away.
Adrian slowly shifted his gaze from Nikki to me.
"If that’s true," he said in a low voice, "you should have told me sooner."
That was all.
Not “Lana.”
Not “My God.”
Not “I’m sorry.”
Not “I’m here.”
If that’s true, you should have told me sooner.
He had somehow managed to turn even my baby into my fault.