7. Eloise #2
Her smile falters. Just a fraction.
“He’s going to be available soon.” I hold her gaze. “You’re welcome to try. But if he picks you, it’ll be because he settled, and you’ll spend the rest of your life knowing it.”
I turn and walk away. My hands are shaking inside my coat pockets and my pulse is hammering behind my ears and I do not look back because looking back means showing her what this cost and I will not pay that price.
Around the corner, I stop and press my back against the brick and breathe.
The anger is different now. Not just at Oliver, not just at the silence, but at the architecture of it, the way Chesca built a house of lies on the foundation of a marriage that was already hollow and used Drake’s face as the front door.
I can’t tell Drake. I can’t say “my husband thinks I’m sleeping with you.”
The knowledge sits in my chest alone and I carry it the rest of the way home.
***
Drake is on the couch when I walk in. He reads my face the way he always does.
“What happened?”
“Nothing. I’m fine.”
“You’re not fine, Ellie.”
“I need to find my own place.” I set my bag down on the counter. “I can’t keep staying here. It’s not fair to you and Jasmine.”
“Jasmine literally told me this morning to tell you she’ll be upset if you leave. Her words. She wants you here.”
“I know. And I appreciate it. But I need my own space.” The real reason lives in my throat and I swallow it whole. “I just do.”
He watches me for a long moment. I can see him deciding whether to push, weighing the cost, calculating whether the Ellie standing in his kitchen is close enough to the edge that one more question would send her over. He decides no.
“Okay. But you’re not apartment hunting while you’re pregnant and refusing to see a doctor. You’re making an appointment this week.”
“Drake.”
“Non-negotiable, Ellie.”
I should argue. I should tell him I’ve been handling my own body and my own life since I was twenty-three and I don’t need a man scheduling my healthcare.
But my back aches from measuring walls and my stomach has been unsettled since the street and the truth is that stubbornness is easier to maintain when you’re not carrying a life that depends on you making better decisions than the ones you’ve been making.
“Fine. This week.”
“Thank you.”
My eyes catch the folder on the table. Manila, unmarked, the one that arrived yesterday from the lawyer’s office. Drake follows my gaze.
“Have you read through it?”
“Not yet.”
“Are you sure about this?”
“Yes.” The word comes out steady, and Drake hears the lie underneath it and says nothing.
I pick up the folder and take it to the guest room and close the door and set it on the desk next to the laptop and the business proposal and the cold mug of tea and I sit down and look at it and don’t open it.
At midnight, I open it.
Drake and Jasmine are on their nightly call in the living room, voices low, the murmur of two people saying good night across time zones. The sound of it is a kindness and a cruelty, and I close the guest room door so I don’t have to hear any more of it.
The pages are clinical. Every sentence is a dismantling, every clause a door being measured for removal.
I read through them, page by page, and my hand finds my stomach and rests there the way it’s been resting there for weeks, instinctive, protective, the only gesture I have left that feels honest.
This is real. This is happening. The woman who tied Oliver Ellington’s tie every morning for three years is sitting in a guest room reading the paperwork that will make her no one to him.
I reach for my phone. The lawyer’s number. I’ll call in the morning, tell her to file, start the clock. My other hand picks up the pen, hovering over the signature line where my name waits in a blank space at the bottom of the page.
The cramp hits low, sudden, nothing I’ve felt before.
Not the nausea. Not the dizziness. This is different, deeper, a tightening that grips from the inside and holds. I freeze, my hand still on the pen, and wait. It passes. I exhale.
Then a second one, stronger, and the pen drops and my hand goes to my stomach and I push back from the desk and stand and the room tilts the way it tilted that first morning in the bathroom except this time it doesn’t correct itself.
The wetness comes before I look down.
I look down.
Blood. Not a lot. Just a spot, just a stain, but it’s there and it’s red and my body goes cold from the scalp down.
My hands grip the edge of the desk and the room is narrowing, pulling inward, the walls closing to a point, and I open my mouth to call for Drake and what comes out is a sound without a word behind it.
My knees buckle. The doorframe catches my shoulder on the way down and I’m on the floor, one hand on the wood and one hand on my stomach, and the pain is a pulse now, rhythmic, insistent.
“Drake.” It comes out thin, barely audible over the sound of Jasmine’s voice in the other room. “Drake!”
Footsteps. His face appears above me, close, urgent, his hands on my shoulders. “Ellie. Ellie, look at me. What’s happening?”
Jasmine’s voice, high, panicked, from the laptop. “What’s wrong? Drake, what’s happening?”
His face is the wrong face. I know this even as he’s holding me, even as his voice is steady and his hands are firm and he’s already reaching for his phone to call for help.
He’s the right person and the wrong face and my vision is blurring and the room is going dark at the edges and the name my mouth shapes isn’t his.
“Oliver…”
The syllables come out broken, barely there, the whisper of a woman who is losing consciousness on a guest room floor, reaching for the man who told her the baby wasn’t his, calling for him anyway because the heart doesn’t file divorce papers, the heart doesn’t read evidence.
My heart is a stupid, stubborn thing that wants what it wants even when what it wants is the last person who deserves to be wanted.
“Oliver. Please.”
The room goes black.
The last thing I feel is Drake’s hand on my face and Jasmine’s voice somewhere far away and the cold floor beneath me and the cramp still pulsing and the divorce papers on the desk above me, unsigned.
Consciousness ends.
I’m calling for a man who didn’t want me or the child I’m trying not to lose.