Chapter 17
PIPER
Platon drops us at a boutique on Madison and will circle back for us when we call him, because a car idling outside a doctor who keeps no institutional records is a detail that ends up in someone’s file. I don’t want him reporting it to Nikita either.
We shop for exactly long enough to be seen doing it, then walk the rest of the way on foot.
Maren loops her arm through mine and steers me east toward the address Mila texted this morning, a brownstone suite with no sign on the door, run by a doctor who keeps her own records under her own lock and never lets a name like mine near a hospital or insurer. “Did you sleep?”
“I slept some.”
“You’re a liar.” She doesn’t slow down or look at me, but she means it kindly. “Do you want to talk, or should I fill the air until we get there?”
“You should fill the air for me.”
She does, as she has since we were both broke and pretending not to be, a running commentary on everyone we pass, including the four-thousand-dollar coat over the two-dollar posture and the handbag that’s a very good fake she clocks instantly.
She keeps it up the whole eight blocks, and I let it carry me, because if she stops, I’ll have to think about what I learned eighteen hours ago.
The suite is small and quiet, and it smells like nothing, which my queasy stomach appreciates.
A woman at the desk takes my false name without blinking.
Maren holds my hand in the waiting room, not gently, like you’d hold a rope, and neither of us says anything until my name that isn’t my name gets called.
“You’re coming in,” I tell her. It isn’t a question.
“You can try to stop me.”
Mila’s suite is one room with a table, a machine, and a window onto a brick wall.
Mila is in a white coat instead of the pajamas she wore on my bathroom floor, which somehow makes it more real.
She has me change and lie back and keeps up an easy line of talk while she works, Maren by my head with two fingers hooked around mine.
“You confirmed the test at home,” Mila says, not a question, prepping the internal probe she says gives the clearest picture this early. “This tells us how far along, and that everything’s where it should be. Breathe normally. This part takes a minute.”
I stare at the ceiling because I can’t look at the screen. Maren looks at it for both of us. Mila works quickly and tells me each thing before she does it. Maren’s fingers tighten around mine, and I focus on breathing. I freeze when Maren makes a sound I’ve never heard her make and says my name.
“Don’t say it. If something’s wrong, just let Mila—”
“I don’t see anything wrong.” Mila keeps her voice level, and her steadiness is the only thing keeping me from panicking. She turns the screen toward me. “I see the opposite, in fact. I want you to look.”
I look.
I don’t know how to read it. It’s gray and grainy, and it means nothing to my eye, until Mila circles one small dark pocket with the tip of a pen.
“That’s the first sac, and that flicker inside it is a heartbeat.
” She moves the pen to a second pocket. “That’s the second sac and the second heartbeat, separate from the first.” She moves it once more, and her voice doesn’t change at all, which is the only reason I don’t come off the table.
“There’s a third sac with a third heartbeat.
I see three separate embryos, Piper. You’re carrying triplets, and all three heartbeats are strong. ”
My ears ring, and the edges of the room blur while the screen in front of me gets sharp. I grip the edge of the table because for a second, I’m not sure I’m still on it.
She does something to the machine, and sound fills the little space, a fast, wet galloping rhythm, then a second layered under it, then a third, three small frantic engines running at once like they have somewhere to be.
I’ve spent my whole life listening for the sound under the sound, the tell a person doesn’t mean to let me hear. I have never heard anything like this.
“There are three,” I say. My voice doesn’t sound like mine.
“It’s three.” Maren’s crying, which I’ve seen exactly twice in four years. She’s laughing at the same time, and she presses the back of my hand to her mouth. “Of course, it’s three. You never could do anything the small way.”
I wait for the fear. I’ve built my whole life on it arriving exactly on schedule, fear of the mark turning, the door opening, the bill I can’t cover, or the brother I can’t reach. I brace for it like you brace for a step that isn’t there.
It doesn’t come.
What comes instead is certainty, and it frightens me more than fear would have.
I want them. All three, in the middle of the most dangerous situation I’ve ever been in, with a man the world thinks is dead and another who wants him dead.
I want these three impossible things without once talking myself into it.
“I’m keeping them,” I say, to Mila, Maren, the brick wall, and myself. “I already knew. I knew it last night. I just needed to say it aloud.”
“I know you did.” Mila wipes the gel away and helps me sit up.
“You’re measuring right at nine weeks, which fits your dates by last menstrual period, and all three are the right size for it.
” She pulls off her gloves. “Triplets change the plan. You need real monitoring now, every two weeks rather than every four, and soon, a specialist I trust who works under the same privacy you have here. It’s a high-risk pregnancy by definition.
That doesn’t mean anything is wrong. It means I watch you like it matters, because it does.
” She meets my gaze. “You decide who knows and when. Three doesn’t change that. ”
“You can’t tell Nikita.” It comes out fast. “You can’t tell him the number or any part of this.
I’ll tell him myself, when I can do it without a war in the next room, when it can be the only thing happening instead of one more thing on the pile.
” I hear how it sounds. “That isn’t me protecting a secret.
That’s me wanting one clear moment to tell him. He’s had so few.”
“He’s your husband on paper and the father in fact, but it’s still your news to time.
” Mila says it without any judgment. “I won’t tell him unless your safety or the babies’ safety forces me to.
If you were hurt and he needed to know about your condition to keep you alive, I would tell him then, and I need you to understand that now.
Short of that, the news is yours.” She waits until I nod. “Neither will Maren.”
“Neither will Maren,” Maren agrees, “although Maren will say out loud that keeping the biggest secret of your life from a bratva boss with trust issues is a plan with some notable weak points.”
“Your objection is duly ignored.”
“I’m serious for one second, then I’ll shut up.
” She takes both my hands and makes me look at her.
“I don’t mean whether he wants you. I know he does.
That man looks at you like you’re the last exit before the bridge goes out.
I mean children, a whole life. Does he want to leave what he is, or does he only want to want to?
You’re about to build the rest of your life on the answer, and I’ve watched you bet everything on a read before. ”
The questions are the exact ones I’ve been refusing to ask myself, which is why she asks them, because that’s the job she’s had since we met, saying the thing I’ve decided not to say.
“He’s dismantling it. The foundation’s going legitimate.
He’s closing the shell companies, the offshore machinery that hid him for four years.
He talks about the house like he expects to live in it, under his own name.
” I picture him in the kitchen this morning, lighter, describing a future instead of another exit.
“I’ve watched a hundred men say they want something without doing any work to make the goal happen.
He isn’t saying it. He’s doing it, and he started before he ever told me. ”
“That’s whether he wants a life.” Maren doesn’t let up yet. “It isn’t whether he wants three children. Those aren’t the same question, and you know it.”
She’s right, and I make myself answer the harder thing instead of talking around it.
“I don’t know if he wants children. I don’t know if he ever let himself want anything that could be used against him, given what his father was.
What I know is that I’m not making them conditional on his reaction.
I’m keeping them if he’s thrilled, if he’s terrified, or if he needs a month to catch up to me.
I decided that on the table. The babies aren’t a question I’m asking him. They’re already true.”
“That’s the one.” Maren’s voice softens, and then she wipes her face with the back of her wrist. “That’s the answer I needed. You’re having three of them. God help all of us.”
Maren and I are halfway back to the boutique to meet Platon when a town car slides to the curb beside us and the window comes down to reveal Vera.
She isn’t supposed to be here. Vera has her own driver, her own schedule, and a habit of not explaining either. None of those things should have put her on this street at this hour.
She’s in the back seat with her phone to her ear, and the second she sees me, she says something short and quiet into it then ends the call, turning the phone face-down against her thigh before I’ve reached the door, covering the motion by smoothing her skirt.
“You two look frozen.” She pushes the door open before I can say anything about the phone. “Get in. I’ll run you back to wherever you’re going. No sense standing on a corner in this wind.”
“We’re fine walking.” I hesitate, then bend to the open door, because refusing a ride I have no reason to refuse would tell her more than taking it will.
Maren reads my face in half a second and slides in first easily, chattering about the cold and giving me the cover to follow. “Since when are you in the city?”