Chapter 2 #3
She paused and laid her hand on her stomach again. This time, the room understood. I heard a woman at the next table draw in a breath. Vivian pressed her napkin to her lips in a performance of emotion. Adrian looked straight ahead, not at me. His profile had never seemed so foreign.
"Because soon, I'm going to be a mother myself," Nikki said.
Applause struck the ballroom like a wave against the hull.
Loud. Sweet. Merciless. People smiled, turned toward Adrian, congratulated him with their eyes, whispered.
Some looked at me with ravenous horror: how would she take it, what would she do, would she cry, leave, cause a scene, give them the evening's finest dessert?
I sat perfectly straight. Beneath my hand, inside my clutch, lay the test. Real.
Mine. Ours. A child whose father knew nothing because he was too busy presenting someone else's lie or someone else's victory onstage; at the time, I did not yet know which.
Nikki glowed. Adrian stood beside her. And suddenly I felt something close inside me.
No slamming door. Just the soft turn of a key.
Inspired by drama that no one had likely included in his script, the emcee came toward our table with the microphone. I saw him move and knew immediately what was about to happen. Sometimes humiliation approaches slowly, smiling, dressed in a tuxedo, and blessed with excellent diction.
"Mrs. Mercer," he said brightly, and the room fell so abruptly silent it was as though everyone had been deprived of air at once.
"You, perhaps more than anyone, understand how important a family's support is at a moment like this. Would you say a few words to the expectant parents?"
The expectant parents. I wanted to lift my glass and smash it against the edge of the table so the sound would finally match what was happening inside me. But I only stood.
Adrian turned his head. His gaze locked onto me.
Don't you dare. I read it clearly. Don't you dare ruin my evening.
Don't you dare show your pain. Don't you dare be human when I have assigned you the role of decoration.
Vivian watched as though she already held a medical report diagnosing me with a breakdown.
Nikki smiled, and her smile held everything: victory, poison, the anticipation of my tears.
I took the microphone. It felt heavy. Or perhaps my hand had gone weak.
"Of course," I said, and my own voice sounded unfamiliar, too even, too adult for the girl who had cried over two lines that morning.
"A child is a miracle. Especially when that child is desperately wanted."
Adrian frowned almost imperceptibly. Nikki's smile vanished for a fraction of a second. I turned to her.
"Take care of yourself. And of what has been entrusted to you."
The room erupted in applause because people love beautiful phrases, even when they do not understand how much blood they contain.
Nikki held out her hand to me. For the cameras.
For the flashes. For this monstrous collective delight.
I looked at her palm, at my watch on her wrist, at her slender fingers with their flawless manicure the color of ripe blood, and placed my hand in hers.
Nikki's skin was warm. Living. Too real for a nightmare.
She leaned toward me and whispered almost soundlessly:
"Good girl. You're learning how to lose so quickly."
I smiled back so the photographers would get a beautiful shot.
"Take care of your wrist," I said just as softly.
"Other people's watches sometimes come with other people's sentences."
Her fingers jerked, but she could not pull her hand away in time because the cameras were clicking, the room was applauding, Adrian was watching us both, and for the first time that evening, I saw something other than irritation in his eyes. Alarm.
I released Nikki's hand and returned the microphone to the emcee.
I sat and laid my palm over the clutch. Inside was the box, and inside that, the small plastic truth I no longer intended to give away.
Now it was evidence. A talisman. A knife without a blade.
Adrian sat beside me a minute later, after the ovation faded and the program continued.
He did not look at me at first. He drank water, listened to the emcee, answered someone with a nod.
Then he leaned close, and his voice brushed my ear colder than the wind off the river.
"What did you hear?"
I turned toward him slowly.
"Tonight? A great deal of useful information. For instance, children are miracles, the foundation is hope, and some men know how to turn a wife into a widow while she's still breathing."
His face did not change, but his hand tightened around his glass.
"I asked what you heard."
"And I told you I've sobered up, Adrian. Don't make a pregnant woman repeat herself."
He went still.
Only for a second. Such a tiny second that no one else in the room would have noticed.
But I did. I, who had spent three years studying his breathing, his silences, his pauses, the movements of his fingers, the way prisoners study the guards' schedules.
His gaze dropped to my stomach. Then returned to my face.
There was no joy in it. No wonder. None of the miracle I had pictured in the car that morning, like a naive fool with a little box in her clutch.
There was calculation. Instant, sharp, cruel.
And in that moment, I understood for certain: if I told him everything now, he would not become a father. He would become a threat.
Then something struck with a muffled boom somewhere beneath us.
At first, the sound was strange, almost out of place, as though someone below had dropped a heavy steel door.
The chandeliers trembled. Ripples passed through the glasses.
The guests did not fall silent immediately, because wealthy people rarely believe in disaster at the first sound.
They are accustomed to someone else fixing everything for them.
Adrian raised his head. Vivian went pale.
Nikki grabbed the table. I felt the yacht shudder beneath my feet with a second, deeper impact, and somewhere far away, no longer in the ballroom but in the belly of that vast white luxury, a woman screamed.
The lights flickered.
The music stopped.
And in the darkness that followed, I heard Adrian say my name without irritation for the first time that evening, but with fear.
"Lana."
But for some reason, he was not looking at me.
He was looking at Nikki.