36. Ethan
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
Ethan
I don’t really remember the drive home.
There are fragments. Headlights cutting across wet pavement.
The city blurring behind glass. My hand gripping the steering wheel too tightly.
My phone lighting up in the console again and again until I turned it face down because if I looked at one more message, I might drive straight through the next red light.
Addy is pregnant.
The thought lands, again and again, with no reduction in force.
A child.
My child.
The realization fractures through me so violently I can barely hold onto a coherent thought. Not just a baby. A future, a responsibility, a line dividing my life into before and after.
By the time I reach the penthouse, my chest feels too tight for my ribs. I park, sit in the silence for several seconds, and force myself to breathe the way I learned to breathe in a cockpit.
Inhale. Hold. Assess.
Exhale. Correct.
Again.
It doesn’t work.
The elevator ride is worse. Too quiet. Too still. Every mirrored surface throws my own face back at me, pale and severe in a half-undone tuxedo, eyes too sharp, mouth too flat.
I’m a man arriving at the scene of something irreversible.
When the doors open, Diane is waiting just inside the penthouse entry with Oliver asleep against her shoulder, one of his arms hanging limp down her back.
He’s too big for her to hold comfortably, but she’s managing it with the determined tenderness of a woman who inserts herself into everyone’s life and somehow becomes necessary.
“He woke up once,” she whispers. “Asked for you, so I brought him up here to sleep.”
Guilt strikes clean and deep. “I’m sorry.”
She studies me. Diane Carter misses very little, which is one of her most aggravating and occasionally useful qualities. Her gaze moves over my face, my open collar, the absence of Addy. “Is she all right?”
“She’s fine,” I say.
It’s the only word I can trust.
I take my son from her carefully. Oliver stirs against me, warm and heavy and smelling faintly of sleep, crayons, and the strawberry shampoo Addy uses on him because he insists it makes him “faster.”
“Daddy?” he mumbles.
“I’m here.”
Diane’s hand comes to my arm briefly. “Call if you need anything. Anything at all.”
“Thank you.”
She leaves quietly, for once without commentary, and that tells me more than words would have.
I carry Oliver inside. Captain follows at my heels, whining softly, his usual drama subdued by the tension in the apartment. The dog knows something is wrong. Of course he does. He has the emotional intelligence of half my board and better loyalty than most of them.
In Oliver’s room, I set him on the bed and remove his shoes. He watches me through sleepy eyes, clutching the blanket Addy folded for him this morning.
“Where is Addy?”
The question nearly takes me apart. “She’s out tonight. But she’ll be back soon.”
“Promise?”
I sit on the edge of his bed. Promises are dangerous things. Pilots know that. Engineers know that. Widowers know it best.
But he’s five.
And I’m his father. “Promise.”
He yawns. “Don’t be sad, Daddy.”
I go still.
Children shouldn’t have to notice their parents’ grief. They shouldn’t learn the shape of it, shouldn’t recognize its footsteps in a room. Oliver has known too much loss by proximity, too much quiet, too many adults lowering their voices as if volume could keep pain from entering.
I smooth his hair back. “I’m all right.”
He gives me a look that’s so Megan’s that for one terrible second, I can’t breathe.
“No, you’re not,” he whispers.
Then he falls asleep.
I sit there long after his breathing evens out.
Captain settles by the door with his chin on his paws, watching me. The room is dim except for the night light on Oliver’s dresser. It throws a soft blue glow over the walls, over the shelves lined with model aircraft, over the photographs I sometimes still can’t look at for too long.
Megan holding Oliver as a baby. Megan in a flight jacket, laughing into the wind. Megan with her hand on the side of an aircraft, head turned toward me, smiling as if the sky belonged to her.
My phone vibrates in my pocket.
I ignore it.
It vibrates again.
Then again.
Work doesn’t care about personal catastrophe. Code doesn’t pause because a woman fainted. Investors don’t soften because a test came back positive. Sabotage doesn’t become less urgent because my life has detonated in a hospital room.
I take the phone out.
Sara: Board wants a private call first thing. Press asking why you left before remarks.
Jeffrey: Demo team found another anomaly in the patch behavior. Call me when you can.
Sara: Bryce was seen speaking to two reporters before he left. I’m trying to contain it.
Jeffrey: Seriously, Ethan. This isn’t right.
I stare at the screen until the words blur.
This isn’t right.
No. None of it is.
I stand, leave Oliver’s room, and walk to my office because motion is easier than thought. Captain follows.
The apartment feels different without Addy in it.
Her absence is loud. It presses against the walls, against the kitchen island where she left a mug this morning, against the folded throw on the couch, against the ridiculous warmth she has somehow threaded into every sterile, expensive corner of my home.
I should go back.
The thought strikes with such force that I stop in the hallway.
I should get in the car, drive back to the hospital, walk into her room, and sit beside her until morning. I should hold her hand. I should tell her I’m scared, but not of her. Not of the baby. Not of the future.
I should tell her she isn’t alone.
My hand goes to my keys.
I don’t move.
The hospital room comes back too vividly. The beeping. The IV. Addy’s face pale against the pillow. Her hand on her stomach. The doctor’s voice. Pregnant. Observation. Ultrasound in the morning.
Then another hospital, another call, another woman I loved somewhere I couldn’t reach in time.
Megan was gone before I arrived.
I didn’t get to hold her hand. I didn’t get to tell her to stay. I didn’t get to bargain with her or physics or whatever cruel equation decides when metal fails and bodies break and lives split into before and after.
I got a report, wreckage, experts telling me pilot error while I stood in a room full of men who’d never seen Megan fly and listened to them turn her final moments into a mistake.
My knees nearly buckle. I grip the edge of the console table and lower my head.
Not again.
Captain whines.
“I’m fine,” I say.
The dog doesn’t believe me. Sensible animal.
I make it to my office and close the door, not because I want privacy from anyone, but because I need a barrier between myself and the life outside it. Oliver asleep. Addy absent. My family expanding before I’ve even understood that I have one again.
Family.
The word is dangerous. It offers too much. It can be taken too easily.
I sit at my desk, but I don’t open the laptop. Instead, I stare at my phone. Addy’s contact is on the screen.
I could call.
No. She needs rest. She’s probably sleeping.
I left her there.
Yes, Oliver needed me. Yes, the doctors said she was stable. Yes, I told her I’d come back first thing.
But I left.
And Addy has been left before.
By Bryce. At the airport. In public. With no apartment, no plan, no safety net. She told me enough pieces for me to understand the wound, and tonight I pressed my thumb directly into it.
My stomach turns.
I scroll through my contacts and find Luci.
She answers on the fourth ring, voice rough with sleep and suspicion. “If this is Bryce, I’ve learned new words since last time.”
“It’s Ethan.”
Silence. “What happened?”
I close my eyes. “Addy fainted tonight.”
“What?”
“She’s stable,” I say quickly. “She’s at the hospital. They’re keeping her overnight for observation.”
I hear movement on the other end. A lamp clicking on. Sheets rustling. Luci fully awake now. “Why is she in the hospital? What do you mean fainted?”
“She collapsed at the gala. Low blood pressure. Dehydration. They ran bloodwork.”
Another silence. This one colder. “What did they find?”
I drag a hand over my face. “She’s pregnant.”
Luci says nothing for two full seconds. “I’m sorry, she’s what?”
“Pregnant.”
“With your baby?”
The question is a blade, but a fair one. “Yes.”
“Oh shit.”
“I know.”
“No, you don’t get to ‘I know’ me in your billionaire trauma voice. Where is she?”
I give her the hospital name, room status, everything I know.
“Are you with her?” Luci asks.
The question lands exactly where it’s meant to.
I look toward the office door even though Addy is nowhere near it. “No.”
Silence stretches across the line, heavy enough that I can feel judgment settling into it before Luci even speaks again.
“I came home to Oliver,” I say, and I hate how defensive it sounds. “He was with Diane. It was late. He woke up asking for me.”
Luci exhales hard. “Okay. Fine. That makes sense.” It shouldn’t relieve me as much as it does. “But is Addy alone right now?”
“Yes.”
The word tastes of failure.
Luci is quiet, and when she speaks again, her voice has changed. Less attack. More focus. “Does she know you called me?”
“No.”
“Good. She’d probably tell me not to come because she’s annoying and thinks needing people is a felony.”
Despite everything, my chest loosens. “True.”
“I’m coming.”
Relief floods me so quickly that I have to put one hand flat on the desk.
“I can send a car,” I say immediately. “Or a plane.”
“A plane?” she repeats. “Ethan, I’m not prepared to be kidnapped by luxury aviation.”
“It wouldn’t be kidnapping.”
“It would absolutely feel like kidnapping if a grief-stricken billionaire sent a private plane to collect me in the middle of the night.”
“I can arrange—”
“I’ll get the next train,” she cuts in. “It’s Chicago, not the moon. Text me the hospital details. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
“Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me yet.”
I still.
Her voice softens, but only slightly. “I like you, Ethan. Against my better judgment, honestly. But Addy is my sister. If you hurt her because you’re scared, I will become a problem money cannot solve.”
“I know.”
“Do you?”
I look toward the closed office door. “I’m trying to.”
Luci exhales again. “Then try faster.”
To think that at the beginning of the night, the biggest fear I had was the demo not working. Now I have no idea what happened with it, and I really can’t force myself to care.