40. Ethan
CHAPTER FORTY
Ethan
Everything changes the moment the elevator chimes.
Captain explodes off the floor.
Oliver gasps as if Christmas has arrived early and sprints toward the private entry so fast his single sock skids on the hardwood. “Addy!”
I move after him, slower because my body has apparently forgotten how to be useful.
Addy stands there.
For one second, I can’t do anything but look at her.
She’s pale. Exhausted. Dressed in soft leggings, a loose sweater, and the kind of careful expression that makes me want to tear the world apart for putting it there.
Her hair is pulled into a messy knot, pieces falling around her face.
One hand clutches a plastic hospital bag.
The other hovers near her stomach before she seems to remember herself and lets it drop.
Luci stands beside her, carrying two bags and wearing the expression of a guard dog in human form.
Oliver throws himself at Addy.
She bends carefully, and I step forward on instinct, one hand lifting because she shouldn’t be bending, she just left the hospital, she fainted, she’s pregnant, she’s…
She catches Oliver against her chest.
“Sunshine!” he wails.
Her face crumples.
“Oh, buddy.” Her voice breaks. “Hi.”
“I missed you,” he says into her sweater.
“I missed you too.”
Captain circles them in frantic loops, whining, tail battering against the wall, then shoving his entire head between Addy and Oliver as if he has been personally abandoned for years rather than one night.
“Captain,” Addy laughs weakly, “please don’t body slam the medically fragile.”
Luci snorts. “Too late. The dog has no respect for discharge papers.”
Oliver pulls back and looks up at Addy. “Did you get fixed?”
Addy blinks. “Did I what?”
“At the hospital.”
Her mouth trembles, but she smiles. “Kind of.”
“Do you have a Band-Aid?”
“I have an IV bruise.”
“Can I see?”
“Absolutely not,” Luci says. “No medical tourism.”
Oliver turns to her. “Hi, Luci.”
“Hi, tiny pilot.” She drops the bags and crouches. “I brought emergency snacks.”
Addy gives a tired laugh, and the sound nearly undoes me.
Because she’s here, standing in my home, in front of me, alive and pale and too far away, and I have no idea how to touch her.
I’ve touched her a hundred ways. In anger, in want, in comfort. In bed. Against walls. Half laughing, half desperate, as if we were both trying to prove that whatever burned between us could exist without consequences.
But now there are consequences. Now there’s a hospital bracelet still around her wrist. Now she’s looking at me, waiting to find out whether I’m another man who leaves.
“Addy,” I say.
Her eyes meet mine. “Hi.”
As if we are acquaintances. As if I didn’t spend the night imagining every possible future and fearing all of them.
Oliver tugs her sleeve. “Come see my new runway. I made it with blocks in my room.”
Addy looks down at him, and the softness on her face hurts. “In a minute, sweetheart.”
Luci steps in smoothly. “Actually, you’re going to show me. I have very strong opinions about airport infrastructure.”
Oliver brightens. “You do?”
“No, but I’m confident.”
Captain follows them because Captain follows joy, snacks, and drama in equal measure.
That leaves Addy and me in the entry.
The apartment expands around the silence.
I take a step toward her. “You should sit down.”
Her brows lift faintly. “That’s your opening line?”
My jaw tightens. “No. That was my panic speaking.”
A small flicker of emotion crosses her face. Not quite a smile.
I’ll take it.
“Come here,” I say, softer.
She hesitates.
That hesitation is a knife.
Then she walks past me toward the living room.
I deserve that too.
I follow her, keeping more distance than I want because every instinct in me is shouting the wrong commands. Pick her up. Put her on the couch. Call three specialists. Buy the hospital. Threaten anyone who made her cry. Seal every exit so nothing can take her from this room.
None of that’s love.
Control isn’t love.
I know that.
I still want control more than air.
Addy lowers herself carefully onto the couch. I sit across from her, because beside her feels too presumptuous and standing feels too cold.
She notices the choice.
“How are you feeling?” I ask.
“Tired.” She looks at her hands. “Scared. Nauseous. Like my body has opened negotiations without legal counsel.”
Despite myself, my mouth shifts.
Then I see the hospital bracelet again, and whatever almost passed for relief disappears.
“I’m sorry.” Her eyes lift. “I should have come back.”
“You had Oliver. And work.”
“I should have come back,” I say again. “I froze.”
Her face changes.
There it is. The truth. Ugly and insufficient.
“I saw you in that bed,” I continue. “I heard the monitor. The doctor. And for a moment, I wasn’t there anymore.”
Addy goes still.
“I was four years ago,” I say. “In another hospital. Too late. Again.”
Her expression softens so quickly it almost makes me angry.
She should be angry. Anger, I understand. Tenderness is harder to survive.
“Ethan,” she whispers.
“That isn’t an excuse.”
“No,” she says. “It’s not.”
I nod once.
She needs to know that.
“But it is a reason,” she adds.
My hands curl into fists against my knees. “I hurt you.”
The words scrape on the way out.
Addy’s eyes shine instantly, like the truth hurts even more spoken aloud. “Yes.”
Before I can answer, her breath catches, and she looks away toward the windows.
“I need to tell you something.”
My pulse slows.
Every pilot knows the moment before impact. The hush, the narrowing of the world, the body becoming instrument and calculation while fear waits outside the cockpit door.
“All right,” I say.
She folds her hands together, then unfolds them. “After I was discharged, Luci and I went to Brewed Awakening.”
“I know.”
Her eyes flash. “Of course you do.”
“The driver told me.”
“Right. Billionaire surveillance package.”
I smile. “I was worried.”
“I know.” Then she draws a breath. “Bryce showed up.”
Everything in me goes cold. “What?”
“With Celeste.”
I stand before I decide to move. “He came near you?”
“Ethan—”
“He came near you after the gala?”
“Yes.”
My vision sharpens dangerously. “What did he say?”
Addy presses one hand against the couch cushion. “Sit down.”
“I don’t want to sit down.”
“That’s very clear from the whole murder statue thing you’re doing, but I need you to sit down.”
I sit.
She tells me. Bryce walking into the café. Luci standing. Sophie ready to commit a pastry-based assault. Bryce asking to talk. Bryce snapping at Celeste. Bryce looking at Addy’s stomach.
My stomach turns to ice.
“Then he asked if it was yours,” she says.
“He asked what?” I say softly.
Addy watches me carefully. “Ethan.”
“He looked at you, in public, after everything he’s done, and asked if the baby was mine?”
“He was trying to hurt me.”
“I know exactly what he was trying to do.
My voice has gone calm.
Too calm.
Addy notices. “Please don’t do anything that requires Luci to bail you out.”
“I have lawyers for that.”
“That’s not what I need to hear.”
I drag a hand over my jaw and turn away, because the thought of Bryce in the same room as her, looking at her body, making her feel exposed, makes something ancient and violent rise in me.
Mine, some primitive part of me snarls.
I tell myself it’s protection instead of possession, though the line between them feels dangerously thin right now… except I’ve already failed to protect her once in the last twenty-four hours.
The realization tastes of blood.
“Celeste stayed,” Addy says.
That pulls me back. “What?”
“She didn’t leave with him. He ordered her to, basically. She stayed.”
I look at her.
Addy’s face is pale but determined now. “She said he’s been getting worse. Controlling, angry, secretive. He told her he had some project here. Something that would prove he was necessary. Something that should have been his.”
The air leaves the room. “What did you say?”
“She didn’t know details. Just that he’s obsessed with his laptop, taking calls outside, barely sleeping.” Addy swallows. “She said he keeps saying once this is over, everything changes.”
Bryce. The backdoor, the archived systems, Megan.
My hands tighten on my knees until my knuckles ache.
“Ethan?”
I force myself to unclench my fingers. “That helps.”
“It does?”
“Yes.”
“Because of the work thing?”
“Yes.”
She waits.
I say nothing else.
Her expression closes by a fraction, and I hate myself for it, but I cannot give her the full horror yet. Not while she is sitting there with hospital discharge papers in her bag and fear under her skin. Not when I barely understand the shape of it myself.
She gives a small nod, as if that confirms what she already suspected.
Then she looks down at her hands again. “There’s more.”
“What happened?” I ask.
Her lips part. Close. She gives a tiny, humorless laugh. “I practiced this in the car, and somehow none of the versions sounded less insane.”
“Addy.”
She looks at me then, and whatever I see in her face makes my heart stop.
“The ultrasound happened this morning.”
I cannot move.
“But…” Her voice breaks.
The world narrows. “But what?”
She presses both hands to her stomach now, no longer trying to hide it. “There are three.”
I stare at her.
The words don’t connect. “What?”
Her eyes fill. “Three babies.”
Silence. Complete. Merciless.
Three.
The word doesn’t process correctly at first. My hands go numb before the meaning fully catches up.
Addy watches me, tears slipping down her cheeks now. “I know,” she whispers. “Believe me, I know.”
I try to speak.
Nothing comes out.
Three.
I see Addy in a hospital bed. I see Megan’s wreckage. I see Oliver as an infant in my arms, screaming for a mother he’d never remember clearly enough.
I see three cribs. Three tiny hands. Three hospital monitors. Three chances for physics or fate to take something from me again.
I grip the back of the chair.
Addy flinches.
That snaps me back harder than anything else could.
Because she thinks I’m horrified by the babies.
By her.
“No,” I say immediately.
She wipes at her cheeks. “You don’t even know what I’m thinking.”
“Yes, I do.”
“You really don’t.”
I cross the space before fear can stop me and kneel in front of her. Her breath catches.
“Addy,” I say. “I’m not horrified by you.”
She looks away. “You look horrified.”
“I’m terrified.”
“That’s not better.”
“It’s the truth.”
Her mouth trembles. I reach for her hands slowly, giving her time to pull away. She doesn’t. Her fingers are cold.
Three babies.
My babies.
Our babies.
A sound breaks in my chest that I refuse to let become anything else.
She sees it anyway.
Of course she does.
“I don’t expect anything from you,” she says suddenly.
The words hit me. “What?”
She pulls one hand free to wipe her face. “I mean it. I know this is insane. I know we weren’t planning this. We weren’t even supposed to be anything. I work for you. I live here. Oliver is your priority. Megan—”
“Don’t do that.” Her eyes snap to mine. “Don’t put yourself beneath my past.”
“I’m not.”
“You are.”
“I’m being realistic.”
“No,” I say. “You’re trying to leave before I can.”
That silences her.
The truth sits between us, brutal and obvious.
She looks shattered.
I lower my voice. “Addy.”
She shakes her head. “Bryce left me with nothing. He made me feel like I was too much, too unstable, too inconvenient to keep. And now I’m pregnant with triplets, Ethan. Triplets. That’s the definition of too much.”
“No.”
“Yes.” Her voice cracks. “I don’t even know what I’m going to do. I don’t know where I’m going to live, or how I’m supposed to work, or whether I can keep being Oliver’s nanny, or whether staying here is the worst idea in the world. I don’t know anything.”
“I just…”
I want to find the right words. I want to say the best thing for her, but there’s nothing there. Only shock. Only terror. Only fear.