2. Ryan
By the time I shut the door to the old chemistry lab, Kaiden is already looking at me like he wants to crack my skull open and inspect the contents himself.
Xander drops onto one of the stools, Danny takes the one beside him with his phone face-down on the table, and Iz comes in last with half a sandwich in one hand and a bag of chips tucked under his arm.
He looks around at all of us, reads the temperature of the room in about a second, and grins.
“Okay. Either Harrington murdered somebody, or we’re planning to murder somebody, and I’d like it formally noted that I support both options and will bring snacks to either.”
“Lock it,” I tell him.
The smile drops off his face. He turns and locks the door without another word, and nobody asks why — and that’s the difference now.
A year ago it would’ve taken ten minutes of everybody being a dick before we got anywhere.
Now we’ve been through enough shit together that when one of us says lock the door, somebody locks the fucking door.
Kaiden crosses his arms. “Ally?”
“Yeah. It’s about Ally.”
Xander straightens on his stool. “What happened? Is she okay?”
“Nothing happened. Nobody’s hurt.” I watch four expressions shift and hold up a hand before they can spiral. “Roman doesn’t know anything, Tremblay doesn’t know anything, Ally’s safe.”
“For now,” Kaiden says.
“For now,” I agree.
Danny watches me and doesn’t say anything, which is exactly what I notice.
He’s been quieter than the others since Becca’s accident — and not the old Danny quiet, either, not the detached thing where he’d sit in the middle of us observing everybody like we were subjects in one of his experiments.
This quiet has weight to it. I put both hands flat on the edge of the lab table.
“I have to tell you something, and before I do, nobody says a fucking word outside this room. Not the girls, not your parents, nobody — not until Ally and I decide how we’re handling it.”
Iz lowers the sandwich. “Okay. You’ve got it. Whatever it is.”
“Ryan,” Kaiden says, low, a warning and a question both.
“Ally’s pregnant.”
Nobody moves. Not even Iz. The fluorescent lights buzz overhead, and somewhere out in the hallway somebody shouts and a locker slams, but inside the lab there’s nothing.
Xander blinks first. “Pregnant.”
“Yeah.”
“Yours?” I just stare at him. He lifts both hands off his knees. “Had to ask. It’s a formality. I’m required by law.”
“No, you’re fucking not.”
Iz’s mouth opens, and Kaiden points at him without looking away from me. “Don’t.”
Danny still hasn’t moved, and that’s the thing that’s pulling at me. Kaiden’s staring at me, Xander’s already three steps into processing it, Iz is visibly restraining seventeen inappropriate comments — and Danny is completely still, his phone lit in his hand, his thumb suspended over the screen.
And suddenly I’m not standing in an empty classroom at Edgewood.
I’m sitting beside him on the bathroom floor at Kaiden’s, months ago, while he holds an ultrasound picture like it weighs a thousand pounds.
I’m remembering the bottles we took away.
His phone that Iz had to confiscate because Danny kept trying to text Becca when he was drunk enough he could barely stand.
The three things that circled through him after the crash, over and over — Daisy, the sister he’d already lost; Becca, the girl he thought he was losing; and the baby he didn’t even know he wanted until it was gone.
I remember watching one of the smartest people I have ever known become completely incapable of solving the one thing that was actually killing him.
“Danny,” I say.
His eyes lift to mine. “I’m okay.”
Nobody in this room believes that sentence anymore, from any of us. But nobody calls him on it either.
“How far along?” Kaiden asks, dragging the room back.
“About ten weeks.”
Xander does the math first, and his eyebrows go up. “New Year’s.”
Iz slowly turns toward Kaiden with a look of dawning delight, and Kaiden says, “No,” before he can get a syllable out.
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You were building toward something.”
“I was thinking, Kaiden. Silently. Like a monk.”
“You’ve never had a silent thought in your life. Don’t start with the guest-room questions.”
Iz considers that, weighs it seriously, and nods. “Fair. I’ll circle back.”
I almost laugh. Almost. Kaiden looks back at me. “When did you find out?”
“Valentine’s Day.”
His expression changes. “You’ve known for a month.”
“Yeah.”
“And Ally?”
“About two weeks longer than that. She sat on it before she told me.”
“She didn’t tell you right away?”
“She didn’t know how. She’d talked herself into carrying it alone. It’s kind of her whole thing.” I say it lighter than I feel it.
Danny finally moves. He sets his phone face-down on the table, deliberate, and looks at me. “How did she tell you?”
The question is quiet, and I know exactly why he’s asking it. “A test,” I say. “She put a positive test in my hand and closed my fingers around it before I could look.”
I want to say something to him and I don’t know what. Sorry would be obscene. Are you okay would be stupid. Anything that puts my baby and the one he lost in the same sentence feels like a knife I’d be handing him to hold by the blade. Danny saves me from trying.
“Is she happy?” he asks.
The question catches me sideways. “Yeah. She’s scared as hell too."
Danny nods once. “And you?”
I don’t have to think about it. “Happy, scared, but happy.”
Another nod, slower this time. “Good.” The word comes out rough, but it’s real, and he says it again like he wants me to actually hear it. “Good, Ry. I mean it.”
I have to look away for a second. “I’m fucking terrified, if we’re being honest.”
“Yeah,” he says. And that’s it. No bullshit reassurance, no everything’s going to be fine — because Danny knows better than anybody in this room not to promise a person that. He leans his forearms on the table. “You don’t have to act weird with me about it. I can already see you doing it.”
“I’m not doing anything.”
“You keep looking at me like you’re waiting for me to crack down the middle.”
“I’ve looked at you twice.”
“Exactly. That’s a lot of eye contact for you. It’s practically a hug.”
Iz snorts, and I point at him without turning around. “Not now.” He lifts his hands.
Danny almost smiles, and then his gaze drops back to the table, and when he speaks again his voice is different.
“It hurts. I’m not going to pretend it doesn’t, and it’s probably going to hurt for a long fucking time.
” His thumb moves along the edge of his phone.
“But Ally being pregnant doesn’t take anything away from ours.
And me missing ours doesn’t mean I’m not happy for you.
Both of those are just — true. At the same time.
All the time. You’ll get used to living inside that. I have.”
“Danny—“
“I’m happy for you,” he says, looking straight at me. “I mean it, and I need you to believe me, because if you spend the next seven months tiptoeing around me I’m going to lose my mind.”
“I know. I believe you.”
Xander leans back against the counter and lets out a breath. “Okay. Can we circle back to the part where Harrington made an entire human being?”
Iz’s hand shoots into the air. “Thank you. Finally. A serious man asking the serious questions.”
“No,” I say.
“I have one question. Kaiden’s house, correct?”
Kaiden closes his eyes. “For fuck’s sake.”
“New Year’s Eve was at your house. That’s established. That’s on the record.”
“I know where my own party was, Iz.”
Iz looks at me, fully committed now. “Guest room, or—“
“I’m going to kill you.”
“I’m building a timeline. Which guest room? Because if it was the blue one, I slept in there after Thanksgiving, and I have some follow-up concerns—“
Xander kicks the leg of his stool hard enough to nearly put him on the floor. “Ow,” Iz says, wounded. “I’m being thorough. Thoroughness is a virtue.”
“You established the timeline,” Kaiden says flatly. “New Year’s. Move on with your life.”
“Fine.” Iz picks his sandwich back up, chews for a second, then points it at me. “Congratulations, though. Genuinely.” I stare at him. He shrugs. “What? I mean it. You’re going to be somebody’s dad, which is objectively insane, and I, for one, am thrilled to be his cool uncle.”
Something in my chest shifts. “Thanks.”
“Yeah, congrats, man,” Xander says, and Kaiden nods, and Danny’s eyes meet mine.
“Congratulations, Ry,” he says.
“Thanks.” And that’s enough of that before somebody actually hugs me and I have to transfer schools. I open my laptop. “The pregnancy changes the Tremblay problem.”
Every trace of humor drains out of the room. Kaiden’s face hardens. “Because he expects her pure.”
“Yeah.”
“Fucking psychopath,” Xander mutters.
They already know most of it. They know about Tremblay, about the marriage, about the fact that Roman promised his daughter to a man older than our fathers like she was a line item in a deal.
They know Tobias is the reason she hasn’t already walked out, that Jane isn’t going to save anybody, that Roman’s name keeps surfacing around exactly the kind of people we’ve spent the last year dragging into daylight.
“Tremblay thinks Roman is delivering him a virgin bride,” I say.
“That’s a term of the deal. Untouched. Pure.
Whatever word those two use when they talk about a teenage girl like she’s a car with the plastic still on the seats.
” Danny’s hand curls into a fist on the table.
“So the second she starts to show, there’s no explaining it away. ”
Kaiden ignores both of us. “How long can she hide it?”
“I don’t know. She’s ten weeks. Her uniform skirt already stopped fitting — she had to size up in secret.” That kills the room.
Xander swears under his breath. “How noticeable?”
Edgewood notices everything eventually — new shoes, missing earrings, whose car you get out of, who leaves lunch early, who stops drinking champagne at parties. A pregnancy is not going to stay invisible forever.