13. Terms and Conditions
TERMS AND CONDITIONS
Lani
He sits down.
That's the first thing he does. He doesn't pace. He doesn't reach for his phone. He pulls out one of my kitchen chairs and sits down like a man settling in for a meeting he didn't schedule but intends to run.
I stay standing. My arms cross over my chest before I decide to do it.
He looks at the test on the counter. Looks at me.
“How are you feeling?”
It's not the question I expected. I expected the data points. The dates, the doctor names, the plan. I expected a man who solves problems opening his phone and starting a list.
“Okay,” I say. “The nausea has been hitting in the mornings. Coffee smells wrong. Otherwise, fine. The other part, I don't know. I haven't had time to know.”
He nods. Doesn't push.
The late afternoon is sliding into evening outside my window. The building across the street is lighting up one window at a time.
“Then we figure out the next thing first,” he says. “Have you seen a doctor?”
“I took the test two hours ago.”
“Do you have an OBGYN?”
“Not one I've seen in a while.”
He nods again. Doesn't reach for the phone. He's running through it the way he runs through everything, but he's keeping it in his head, not making a list in front of me.
“Then that's the first thing,” he says. “Whenever you're ready. I can recommend someone or you find your own. Your call.”
I watch his face.
He's holding himself in check. The way he did in the car after I said too late. He knows that moving too fast right now could be the wrong move.
“I have to ask you something,” he says.
I brace.
“How are we doing this?” He keeps his eyes on mine. “I'm not asking what you want to do. I'm asking how you want to talk about it. Because I have a tendency to take a problem and start solving it, and I can feel myself wanting to do that, and I don't want to do that to you.”
I stare at him.
This is not the man I expected to find in my kitchen.
The man I expected would be three calls deep by now. Lawyer. Doctor. Security. He'd be making decisions and presenting them as offers.
This man is asking me how I want to be talked to.
“Not like I'm a problem you're solving,” I say. “Treat this conversation like a conversation, not a strategy session.”
“Okay.”
“And the custody case is yours. Lily is yours. I don't want to complicate that. So, before we figure out anything else, I need to know what you want here. Not what you think is responsible. What you want.”
He's quiet for a long moment.
“I want this baby,” he says. Plain. Direct. “I didn't know I was going to want this baby until I walked into your kitchen, and you handed me that test. But I do. I want this baby and I want it to know me, and I want to be in your life in whatever shape that ends up taking.”
“That's what I want,” he says. “What do you want?”
I haven't had time to know what I want. I've been carrying this for two hours and most of those I spent staring at a pregnancy test trying to figure out how to tell a man who would be three moves ahead of me.
But sitting here, with him watching me like he wants the answer, I find it isn't far away.
“I want to make this decision with my eyes open,” I say. “I want a real doctor's appointment. I want to think. And I want to do all of that without being moved into a glass tower and rebranded as your discreet situation.”
He almost smiles. It doesn't happen. But the edges of it are there, and it's the most human I've seen him look since he walked through my door.
“Noted,” he says.
He sits with me at the table for twenty minutes.
Not solving anything. He asks about my health insurance, whether I want to keep working at the office, whether I've eaten.
I haven't. He doesn't make it a thing. He gets up, opens my fridge, finds leftover pasta and the bread I bought on Sunday, and starts heating things up.
The man can't cook. That's obvious from how he handles the burner. But he's trying.
He sets a plate in front of me. Sits back down.
I eat. He watches the window.
When I'm done, he takes the plate to the sink. Rinses it. Stacks it on the drying rack like he's done it before, which he probably has. He raised a baby alone for over three years.
He sits back down.
“There is one thing I want to put on the table,” he says.
I wait.
“The penthouse. Where Lily and I live.” His voice is even. “I'm not proposing you move in. What I'm offering is, when you're ready, if you want it, the guest wing. Your own bedroom, your own bathroom, your own door that locks. The building has security. The press doesn't have the address.”
“And if I don't want that?”
“Then nothing changes.”
“Why are you offering it?”
“Because in about three months you're going to start showing. The tabloids are going to figure it out before then. I can give you privacy I can't give you anywhere else. That's all the offer is.”
“What about Lily?”
The question lands. He looks at me.
“She doesn't know about any of this.”
“And if I'm in your home, she's going to see me. She's going to ask questions.”
“She will.” A pause. “The custody hearing is coming soon. I'm not going to introduce you as anything to her until we know what we're doing. Right now, you'd be a friend staying in the guest wing.”
“And after the hearing?”
“After the hearing we figure it out. Together. With her in mind.”
I let it sit.
The facts are simple. I'm pregnant. I have a job I can't go back to and a story I can't tell my best friend, and an apartment with a broken buzzer and no security. When the tabloids find out, I have nowhere to go.
I look at my kitchen. The notebooks on my desk. The plant on the windowsill. This apartment has been mine for years. I painted the bathroom myself because the landlord said he'd get to it, and I knew he never would.
I built a company once. It didn't survive. I signed the paperwork to close it and got up the next morning and kept moving because that's what I do.
I don't need to be rescued. But needing help isn't the same as being rescued. I know the difference. Being proud and being smart are not the same thing. Right now, being smart means making a decision that protects me and this baby, not one that feels like it does.
He's at my kitchen table, phone in his pocket, hands flat on the surface, watching me think. He doesn't rush it. He doesn't offer reassurances.
He waits. That takes something out of him. Ethan Mercer does not wait. Control is not a habit for him. It's the scaffolding that holds everything up. He's doing it anyway.
He reaches into his jacket pocket.
He sets a key card on the table between us. Doesn't slide it toward me. Doesn't touch my hand.
“It's your choice,” he says. “Take it now. Take it next week. Don't take it at all. I'm not going to bring it up again unless you do.”
His face is open in the way it gets when he's not performing anything. No strategy. No management.
I look at the key card.
I look at him.
I don't pick it up yet.
But I don't walk away either.