Chapter 22 Nina #2
Chris is different with them. I watch him across the table—the way he softens around Callie, the easy warmth when he and Mason fall into a natural back-and-forth.
For stretches he almost looks like himself.
Then his eyes will track a movement at the edge of his vision, or his hand will pause mid-gesture as if running some internal threat assessment, and I can see what a civilian wouldn’t—the hypervigilance he probably doesn’t even recognize in himself anymore.
But the flashes of the old Chris are real, and they make my chest ache in ways I can’t afford right now.
The proximity to them both makes it difficult to focus on the dinner conversation.
Every time Chris reaches for his water glass or passes a serving dish, I’m hyperaware of his hands.
The same hands that held me that night, that traced patterns on my skin like he was memorizing me.
And Wyatt’s closeness, his clean-scented aftershave, invokes memories of that kiss in the elevator that started this whole disaster in the first place.
“The snorkeling was incredible,” Callie is saying. “Mason insisted on swimming with the manta rays, even though they’re basically underwater aircraft carriers.”
“They’re gentle giants,” Mason protests.
“They’re the size of small planes,” she counters. “But watching you with them was...” She pauses, her expression softening. “You were so at peace out there. Like you’d found your element.”
Her voice carries wonder, maybe, or the particular tenderness of someone discovering new depths in the person they love. It’s beautiful, watching them together. The easy intimacy, the way they orbit each other like they’re sharing the same gravitational pull.
“And how are you settling in, Nina?” Mason asks, turning his attention to me. “Is LA treating you well?”
“It’s... good,” I say, though my voice sounds distant even to my own ears. “Still adjusting.”
“Nina’s been doing incredible work,” Wyatt says, and the pride in his voice makes warmth unfurl in my chest despite everything. “Her first sessions went better than anyone hoped.”
Chris’s jaw tightens almost imperceptibly. “I’m sure they did.”
His voice carries an edge that catches me off guard. Not anger, exactly, but sharper than the response warrants. I glance between them, sensing an undercurrent I don’t understand.
“Nina’s always been good at seeing what people need,” Callie interjects, clearly sensing the tension and trying to steer us back to safer ground. “Even when they don’t know it themselves.”
The irony of the statement isn’t lost on me. If I’m so good at seeing what people need, why am I sitting here carrying secrets that are eating me alive?
The rest of dinner passes in a blur of conversation and food-inspired silences. I smile when I’m supposed to, laugh at Mason’s jokes, compliment Marcella’s tres leches cake. But underneath it all, I’m drowning in everything I haven’t said.
When the last forkful is finished and Mason starts gathering serving dishes, I spring into action.
“I’ll clear,” I announce, already reaching for the nearest plates.
“Nina, you don’t need to—” Marcella starts.
“Please,” I say, the edge in my voice surprising even me. “I need to move.”
I gather dishes with perhaps more efficiency than necessary, grateful for the task that gives me an excuse to escape the attention of everyone at the table.
The kitchen is blissfully quiet after the laughter and conversation of the patio. I set the dishes beside the sink and grip the counter, trying to steady my breathing. The marble is cool under my palms, grounding me in something real and solid.
Just a few minutes. That’s all I need. A few minutes to collect myself before I have to go back out there and pretend everything is normal.
“You okay?”
I spin around. Chris is standing at the edge of the tile, hands in his pockets, expression concerned.
“Fine,” I say automatically. “Just needed a minute.”
He steps into the kitchen, and suddenly the room feels smaller, the air thicker.
“You’ve been off all night,” he says quietly. Not an accusation—an observation. “And not office-off, not the I-wasn’t-expecting-you kind of off. This is different. You’re keeping distance from me in a room full of people who love you, and that’s not us.”
He’s right. It’s not us. Even at our worst, even after he left, I’ve never been careful around Chris. Guarded, yes. Angry, absolutely. But never this—this measured, clinical distance that belongs in a session room, not a kitchen with someone I’ve loved almost all my life.
“I’m carrying too many things at once,” I say. It’s the truest thing I can offer without detonating everything. “Feelings about you, about Wyatt, about what that night meant and what it changed. And I don’t know how to hold all of it in the same room.”
His jaw works for a moment. “Is this about the job? About Amador and Flores?”
Of course that’s where he goes. It’s the thing he can name, the threat he can assess.
“No,” I say. “The work is fine. They’re... complicated, but that’s not what’s doing this to me.”
His eyes search my face, and I can tell he hears the shape of what I’m not saying—knows there’s more underneath.
“What did it change, that night?” he asks, moving closer. I catch the woody spice of him and the proximity makes it harder to think.
Everything. It changed everything.
But I don’t say that, and my silence must tell him enough, because he fills it himself. “That night meant so much more than I realized. And I’m sorry I left without saying goodbye.”
“And now?”
He reaches up, fingers ghosting along my cheek. I should step back. Should maintain distance. Should remember that Wyatt is just outside, that I haven’t finished the conversation that matters most.
Instead, I lean into his touch.
“Now I think I was an idiot,” he says.
His thumb traces my lower lip, and my breath catches. Before I can think better of it, I curl my fingers around the back of his neck and kiss him.
It’s desperate, hungry, all the want I’ve been suppressing for weeks condensed into a single point of contact. He responds immediately, his other hand coming up to cup my face, angling my head so he can deepen the kiss.
And for one reckless, airless second, I let it happen.
Then the guilt hits like a wave breaking over my head. Wyatt. The pregnancy. The abortion. Chris’s hands on my face and his mouth on mine and he doesn’t even know—
I wrench backward. “Stop. I can’t—we can’t—”
“Nina—”
“I was pregnant.” It comes out like something breaking. Not a confession—a rupture. “After that night, after I moved to LA, I found out I was pregnant and I—” My voice cracks. “I’m not anymore.”
His face goes blank. It’s the worst kind of blank—not the trained mask, just incomprehension. Like the words reached him but his brain won’t assemble them.
“I had an abortion,” I say, because apparently my mouth has decided that if I’m going to destroy this, I’m going to be thorough about it. “A week ago. Callie was there. And I should have told you, I know I should have told you, but I couldn’t—I can’t—”
I’m backing away from him. Not toward the door, just away, and my hands are shaking too badly to do anything with them so I press them against the counter behind me and try to breathe but I can’t breathe because I just told him and now it’s real and now he knows and—
“Nina.” Chris moves toward me. “Look at me.”
“Don’t.” I hold up a hand. “Don’t be kind about this. I don’t—I can’t handle that right now.”
“You think I’d be angry?”
The confusion in his voice nearly breaks me. Because yes—I expected anger, betrayal, how could you not tell me. I needed it, almost. Anger I know how to absorb. Compassion from the man whose baby I—
“I took something from you,” I manage. “Without asking. Without even telling you there was something to take.”
“You didn’t take anything from me.” He says it so simply.
Like it’s obvious. Like he knows exactly what pregnancy means to the girl who lost her mother to it.
Because he does. He was there when I was nine and lost my shit over a pregnant woman in the grocery store, or when I was fourteen and had a panic attack at a baby shower. He knows.
And I can’t stand it. His understanding is worse than anger because it leaves me nowhere to put the shame.
“Wyatt knows,” I hear myself say. “I told him tonight. Before you got here. And he—we haven’t even finished that conversation—and now I’m in here kissing you and telling you things I—”
I’m spiraling. I can hear it in my own voice—the pitch climbing, the sentences fragmenting—and some distant clinical part of my brain recognizes it but can’t stop it. I’m pressing my back against the counter, and my hands are pulling at each other like I can wring the guilt out through my fingers.
“Nina. Hey.” Chris is in front of me. His hands close around my wrists—not pulling, just stopping the motion, his thumbs finding my pulse the way they did a hundred times when we were younger and I was coming apart. “Listen to me. Breathe.”
“I can’t be here. I need to—I have to go—”
“Just breathe. You’re okay.”
“I’m not okay—”
“Let go of her.”
We both freeze.
Wyatt is in the doorway, his figure blurred by my tears.
“I said let go.”
Chris drops my wrists. Steps back. But the damage is done—Wyatt crosses the kitchen, puts himself between us, and the rigid line of his shoulders tells me he’s drawn the most obvious conclusion to what he saw.
“Are you okay?” He’s facing me, his voice low. Behind him, Chris hasn’t moved.
“He wasn’t hurting me—”
“You’re shaking, Nina.”
“She told me about the pregnancy,” Chris says.
The silence that follows is catastrophic.
Wyatt doesn’t turn around. I watch his jaw set, his hands curl at his sides, and I can see the story writing itself behind his eyes: I told Chris, he didn’t take it well, and now Wyatt needs to protect me from the fallout.
“I need to leave,” I say.
“Nina—” Chris starts.
“Let me go,” I say to both of them. Or neither of them because I don’t know who I’m talking to anymore. I grab my purse from the counter and move for the door, and neither of them stops me, which is its own kind of devastating.
The night air hits me and I realize I’ve been holding my breath since the kitchen. My car is right there. I get in. I start it. I pull out of the driveway and I signal at the corner because that’s what normal people do, and I am a normal person having a normal night and I am fine.
I make it two blocks before the sob breaks loose.
I pull over. Park. Press my forehead against the steering wheel and let it come—all of it, the kiss and the confession and Chris’s face and Wyatt’s rigid shoulders and the shame that hasn’t gone anywhere, hasn’t even shifted, despite the fact that both men now know and neither one reacted the way I braced for.
I don’t know how to go back. I don’t know how to go forward. I don’t know how to be in a room with either of them until I figure out how to stop hating myself for a decision I’d make again.