14. Adriana #2
My whole body goes tight before my brain even catches up to who it is.
That voice. I’ve spent my whole life flinching at that voice, bracing for whatever came after it, and three weeks of distance hasn’t undone twenty-some years of it.
My heart slams. For one ugly second I’m small again, the second daughter, caught doing something wrong.
Then I make myself turn and look, and it takes me a moment to recognize her, and that’s the first sign something’s wrong, because Viviana has never in her life been hard to recognize.
She’s always polished to a shine. Now her hair’s pulled back rough, no makeup, a coat thrown on over clothes she’s clearly been in for a while.
Her face is blotchy. She looks like she hasn’t slept.
She looks, I realize, like I did a couple of weeks ago in that lobby.
And the fear drains out of me as fast as it came, because she’s not my father, and she’s not the girl who used to make me feel like nothing. She’s just my sister, falling apart on a sidewalk.
“Viviana.”
“Don’t.” She’s shaking. “Don’t you dare stand there looking calm. You did this. You ruined everything. On purpose.”
“I didn’t do anything on purpose.”
“Liar.” Her voice cracks high. “You told everyone. You and that disgusting brother paraded around making sure the whole city knew, and now I can’t go anywhere, I can’t show my face, people I’ve known my entire life won’t return my calls…”
“I didn’t make any of it up.” I keep my voice level. “You did all of it, Viviana. You ran. You came back. You slept with my husband. I just stopped lying about it for you.”
That stops her. For a second she just stares at me, and I watch the anger drain out of her face and leave something worse behind, something I’ve never once seen on Viviana, who has been certain of her place in every room since we were children.
She looks lost.
“You don’t get it,” she says, and her voice has dropped, gone uneven.
“You get to just walk away clean. You always land on your feet, don’t you, you always have, the quiet one everybody feels sorry for.
” She wraps her arms around herself. “I’m the one who’s stuck.
I’m the one who can’t fix it. I can’t undo any of it and I can’t… ”
She stops. Her mouth works. Whatever she came here to throw at me, this isn’t it, and I can see her trying to swallow it back down and failing.
“Viviana.”
“You don’t understand the position I’m in.” Higher now, the words coming faster. “You think I have options. I don’t have options, I don’t have time, I have to make this work and there’s no version where it works, there’s no…”
“What are you talking about?”
And it bursts out of her like she’s been holding her breath for a month.
“I’m pregnant.”
The street noise goes very far away.
For a moment she looks as shocked as I am that she said it. Then her face hardens, like she’s decided that if it’s out, she might as well aim it.
“It’s Rafael’s,” she says. “So whatever you and Enzo think you won, it doesn’t matter. He’s mine. We’re going to be a family. You were just the placeholder. You always were.”
I stand there and I wait for it to hurt.
I really do. I take an inventory, the way you press on a bruise to see how bad it is.
The man I was married to for seven months.
The man who told me I was better than her, who let me think this could be real.
A baby. Her, and him, and a baby, the whole future I half-let myself imagine, handed to her instead.
And there’s nothing. No drop, no crack, no flood. Just a clean, almost startling quiet.
Maybe my love for him never ran as deep as I told myself it did. Or maybe it died the second I opened that bedroom door, and I’ve been walking through an empty house ever since without noticing the lights were already off.
“Congratulations,” I say.
Viviana blinks. “What?”
“I mean it. I hope it goes well for you.” I find that I do mean it, in a distant sort of way, the way you’d mean it to a stranger on a train. “Tell Rafael to sign the divorce papers. The sooner he does, the sooner he’s all yours. Nothing standing between you. Isn’t that what you want?”
“You…” She’s staring at me like I’ve broken some rule she didn’t know how to play without. “Father cut me off. I’m out of the will. I’m out of everything. I’ll never get any of it back.”
“I know how that feels,” I say. “He did it to me too, remember. In front of a whole ballroom.”
“I have nothing now.”
“You have Rafael. You have the baby. You just told me.” I shift my bag on my shoulder. “If that’s still not enough, then I don’t know what to tell you, Viviana. I gave up wanting any of it a while ago. It costs too much.”
I step around her toward the door.
“That’s it?” she shouts after me. “That’s all you have to say? I’m carrying his child, Adriana!”
“I heard you.”
“Don’t you walk away from me!”
But I do. I walk through the doors and let them swing shut behind me, and the last thing I hear is her voice climbing higher and higher with nobody left in the street to perform it for.
In the elevator I lean against the wall and breathe.
Pregnant. Which means whatever’s between them probably started earlier than I ever let myself think.
Before the bedroom, before she came back.
Maybe while I was living in that house in my separate room, learning to like him, telling Amelia I thought we could have a real marriage.
Maybe while I was choosing a dress to wear for him.
It should gut me. I keep waiting for the part where it guts me, the way you wait for a delayed sound, bracing for the boom after the flash.
It doesn’t come.
The doors open on Enzo’s floor and I don’t step out right away.
I just stand there, holding the doors with one hand, taking stock of myself.
And what I find isn’t grief. It’s lighter than that.
It’s the feeling of setting down something I’ve carried so long I forgot it had weight, that strange ache in the arms after the heavy thing is finally on the ground.
I think I expected getting free to feel like winning. It doesn’t. It feels like quiet. I’m not sure anyone warned me that those could be the same thing.
I let myself in. Enzo’s at the counter with his sleeves rolled up, and he takes one look at my face and goes still.
“What happened?”
“Viviana found me downstairs.” I set my keys in the bowl by the door, and I notice my hand isn’t even shaking. “She’s pregnant. Rafael’s.”
His jaw tightens. He crosses the room. “Ana…”
“I’m okay.” And the strange thing is, saying it, I find out it’s true. “That’s the part I can’t get over. I keep checking and I’m actually okay.”
He stops in front of me, searching my face like he doesn’t believe it, like he’s braced to catch me when it finally hits.
“You don’t have to be okay,” he says quietly. “Not for me. You can be furious. You can fall apart. I’m not going anywhere either way.”
“I know.” And I do know, that’s the thing. “But I’m not going to. I think I’m just done bleeding for them. All of them. I think I finally ran out.”
He doesn’t say anything to that. He just pulls me in, one hand spread warm between my shoulder blades, and I let myself lean into him, and for a while we stand in his kitchen and I don’t have to be anything at all.
It’s a long moment before my phone buzzes in my pocket.
I almost don’t look. I’m warm and settled and I don’t want to let the outside back in just yet. But it keeps going, insistent, and I pull it out. A number I don’t recognize. Something makes me answer it anyway.
“Hello?”
“Adriana.” Rafael’s voice, breathless, like he’s been waiting on this ring for hours. “Thank God. Thank God you picked up. Don’t hang up, please. I need to see you. It’s important. It’s really important.”
I look at Enzo. I look at the keys in the bowl, the apartment that’s started to feel like somewhere I live instead of somewhere I’m hiding.
Fuck it.