9. Arielle
ARIELLE
The glass office door is closed, the blinds are drawn, and Nolan Ashford is standing on the other side of a small round table in a charcoal suit that costs more than my rent, asking me a question whose answer I have already given him.
“Twelve weeks tomorrow,” I say again, because I won’t let him circle me a third time. “You’re not entitled to a more detailed answer, Mr. Ashford, and this isn’t the room where I elaborate.”
"In Miami you called me Nolan."
"In Miami I also told you I would not be staying for breakfast, and you may notice that I haven't."
He laughs. It's not a real laugh. It's the dry, startled sound a man makes when something has gotten through a layer he didn't know was thin.
He sets his hand flat on the back of one of the conference chairs and leans on it, knuckles whitening, and I can see him deciding, in real time, which version of himself he is going to bring into this room.
"Sit down, Arielle."
"I'm fine standing."
"You are twelve weeks pregnant and you have been on your feet since seven this morning. Sit down. Please."
The please is what does it. I take the chair on my side of the small round table, because I am tired, and because the chair is closer than my own office, and because pretending I am not tired in front of him at this exact moment is going to cost me more than sitting down will.
I keep my notebook on my lap. I do not unbutton the blazer.
He doesn't sit. He stays braced on the back of the chair across from me. "How long have you known?"
"Four weeks. Give or take."
"Four weeks. So you have been in coordination meetings with my company, on my project, drawing my building, knowing this, for a month, and at no point during any of that month did it occur to you that I might want to be informed."
"It occurred to me, Nolan. I considered it. I made a decision."
"You made a decision."
"I made a decision. I am thirty-one years old. I am an adult. I am allowed to make decisions about my own body and my own pregnancy without consulting a man I spent six hours with on a balcony in July."
"Six hours during which a child was conceived, Arielle."
"Don't do that. Don't do the during which thing like you're delivering a closing argument.
I was there. I remember exactly how long we spent on the balcony, exactly how long we spent off it, and exactly which one of us closed the drawer.
So do you. Don't put your hand on a chair in my firm's office and try to make me feel like I committed a crime by not picking up a phone. "
He breathes out through his nose. The hand on the back of the chair loosens, then tightens again.
"I never asked you to feel like you committed a crime."
"You walked into my conference room without warning, sat across from me for ninety minutes, watched me present in front of my partners, and pulled me into a glass office with the blinds drawn the minute the meeting ended.
If you didn't intend to make me feel cornered, Nolan, you should have called Carla and asked for a phone meeting. "
"I didn't know."
"You suspected."
“I suspected. I came up to confirm it. Those aren’t the same thing, and I’m not offering an apology for the distinction.”
"I am not asking you to apologize. I am asking you to take a step back from this chair, because you are looming, and I have spent six weeks being loomed over by men in this firm, and I do not have the patience for it from you today."
He looks at his own hand. He looks at me. He takes one step back from the chair, deliberate, the way a man walks his dog back from somebody's lawn. He doesn't sit. But he isn't braced anymore.
"Tell me what you decided."
“I’m keeping the baby. I made that decision at four in the morning on a Tuesday three weeks ago, alone in my apartment with a cup of ginger tea, after Dr. Ellis gave me twenty-four hours to think.
I don’t owe you the conversation I had with myself that night.
But I’ll tell you the part that involves you, because I’m a fair person and you deserve to hear it once, not twice. ”
"I'm listening."
“I wasn’t going to ask you for money, and that hasn’t changed.
I’m not asking you to be there when the baby comes, or to sign a certificate, or to negotiate custody.
I’m not asking you for a single thing, Nolan, because the second I ask for one, you’ll give me a dozen—beautifully wrapped, perfectly offered—and I’ll spend the rest of my life trying to return them. ”
"That's a lot of words to call me generous."
"That's a lot of words to call you controlling."
He looks at me the way he did on the balcony in July, as if I’m the only thing he’ll allow himself to see, and the force of it strikes a part of my chest I’ve kept sealed for three months.
"Arielle. You are carrying my child."
“I’m carrying a child. The genetic contribution is yours. I’m not debating biology with you. I’m challenging the conclusion you’ve drawn from it — that biology gives you a vote in how I handle the next twenty-eight weeks of my life. It doesn’t.
We had one night. We barely know each other. You don’t know my middle name. You don’t know my mother’s name. You don’t know how I take my coffee. You don’t know whether I’d choose a hospital birth or a birthing center.
You don’t get to skip all of that and land on I get to be involved.”
"Then ask me the questions, Arielle. I'll answer them.
I'll tell you my middle name, my mother's name, my father's name, the year I stopped speaking to him, and what I take in my coffee, which is nothing, because anything else is a waste of perfectly good coffee.
Ask me. I am standing here asking you to ask me. "
“I don’t want to ask you. That’s the entire point. I don’t want to. I’ve spent eight years constructing a life that doesn’t hinge on anyone else’s generosity, and I won’t dismantle it because a man I slept with once three months ago believes a chromosome earns him a seat at my table.”
"Because of a child."
"Because of my child."
"Ours."
"Mine, Nolan."
He doesn't move. Neither do I. The blinds on the glass door are drawn, but I can hear Terry's voice in the corridor outside, two doors down, asking someone where I went. I do not call out. Nolan does not look at the door.
"I will be involved," he says, quietly. "Whether you like it or not, Arielle, I will be involved. That is not a threat. That is a fact I am stating out loud because I am too tired to let you walk out of this room thinking I'll forget by Monday."
"Then we are going to have a very long disagreement, Mr. Ashford, because every instinct in my body is telling me that the second I let you in, you will fill the room, and there will not be space left in it for me."
"That's not what I want."
"It is what you do."
"You don't know what I do."
“I read your firm’s last five years of acquisitions on the flight back from Miami. I know your pattern. You spot something you want. You buy the building, then the block, then the corridor. I refuse to be a corridor, Nolan. I refuse to be a parcel.”
I stand up. He doesn't try to stop me. I tuck the notebook under my arm, and I open the door, and I walk down the corridor past Terry, who takes one look at my face and does not ask, and I get into the elevator alone and I press the button for the lobby and I keep my hand flat against my stomach all the way down.
Outside on Wacker the wind off the river is mean. There's a black town car at the curb that I do not need to see twice to know who it belongs to. The back window comes down as I pass.
"Arielle. Let me drive you home."
"No."
"It's forty degrees and you're three months pregnant."
"It's forty degrees and I have a coat, and I have a CTA pass, and I have legs, and I would rather walk to the Blue Line in this wind than sit in a car you paid for. Tell your driver to stop trying to roll alongside me, Nolan. It's embarrassing for both of you."
The window goes up. The car does not pull away.
I do not look back. I walk to the Clinton stop with the river going gray on my left and my hand inside my coat pocket curled into a fist around nothing, and by the time I am on a westbound train I have stopped shaking and started thinking in straight lines again.
I get to my building a little after seven. The lobby is empty. The doorman nods at me the way he has nodded at me every night for four years.
Then I cross the street toward the coffee shop on the corner to grab a decaf I do not need, and I see them.
A black SUV at the curb in front of my building.
Two men inside it, neither of them in uniform, both of them very obviously not looking at me in the way that only a person who has been trained not to look at someone can pull off.
I stand on the corner with my hand on my stomach and my coat collar turned up against the wind, and I stare at that SUV until the man in the passenger seat lifts a phone to his ear and says something brief into it.
Six hours. He gave me six hours.
I turn around without buying the coffee and walk back to my building, past the SUV, past the doorman, past my own reflection in the lobby glass, and I go upstairs and I lock my door and I sit at the side of my bed, still in my coat, my phone warm in my hand, and I do not call him. Not under any circumstances.