1. Zuri #3
I pressed the button for the ground floor. He didn't try to follow. He just stood there, his eyes doing something I wasn't going to let myself examine.
But I felt his gaze. Felt it like a physical thing, tracking the bump one more time. Wondering. Calculating. My hands were trembling — evidence of the panic I was very carefully not expressing — and I pressed them flat against my thighs.
"Thank you," he said, as the doors slid shut.
I didn't respond.
My breath didn't come back until the elevator was three floors down. Well, I thought, gripping the handrail while riding down in silence, that went about as well as showing up to a fire with gasoline.
The lobby was cool when I got there. Climate-controlled to perfection.
I walked through it the way I'd walked through the conference room — like I knew exactly where I was supposed to be.
My heels clicked against the marble. Expensive.
Assertive. Every step a declaration of war against the possibility that I might dissolve.
Tasha was waiting by the valet stand, her eyes on me, reading my face the way she'd learned to read it in seventeen years.
"We good?" she asked. She was already smiling. Already preparing to celebrate.
"We're perfect," I said. "We just landed it."
"Girl." She grabbed my arm. "Your face is doing that thing."
"What thing?"
"The thing where you look like you just won the Super Bowl and lost your car keys at the same time." She squinted at me. "What happened in there?"
"Nothing. Numbers. Very exciting numbers." I steered us toward the parking garage elevator. "Can we celebrate before you psychoanalyze me? I'd like at least thirty minutes of joy before the interrogation."
She let me have it. That was the thing about Tasha — she always let me have the thirty minutes. Then she'd come for my whole life with a wine glass in one hand and the truth in the other.
I didn't tell her about the green building strategy or the five lenders or the way I'd just restructured an entire company while my heart was trying to kill me from the inside.
I didn't tell her that the man who'd been a ghost for seven months was now a problem I had to solve every day for the next eighteen months.
On P2, Tasha squeezed my arm once, then peeled off toward the row where she'd parked. "Thirty minutes," she called. "Then I want the truth." I lifted a hand without turning and kept walking toward my own car.
I already knew how to do that. I'd been practicing for seven months.
Got in my car. Locked the doors.
And then I screamed.
It was a full-bodied scream, the kind that started in my diaphragm and came up through my ribs like something trying to escape.
The kind that didn't care that my makeup cost forty dollars or that my lipstick was still perfect.
The kind that knew — on some cellular level — that my life was now infinitely more complicated than it had been that morning.
My hands were shaking against the steering wheel. My breathing came in ragged chunks.
You can do this. You are doing this.
When I was done, I pressed my forehead against the wheel and breathed. Slow breaths, the kind my pregnancy app promised would work eventually. The baby settled, like she'd felt the storm and decided to wait it out.
I checked the rearview. The lipstick was, miraculously, still intact.
I started the engine and drove back to my office, where my team was waiting to celebrate the biggest contract our firm had ever landed, and where I would let them believe the happiness on my face was about the contract and not about the complicated, terrifying fact that I was about to be tethered to Liam Cavanaugh for eighteen months.
Eighteen months of meetings. Eighteen months of looking at him across a table and not being able to say: This is your daughter. This is what your one-night stand grew into.
By five p.m., home, door locked, hand on my belly, I let myself shake.
Let myself feel the weight of what I'd just done.
My mother called at six, the way she did every evening since I'd told her, and I let her voice — practical, warm, full of questions about whether I was eating — talk me back into my own body.
After a morning as the only Black woman directing a table of white executives, her voice returned me to the self that had never needed their permission.
"You sound tired," she said.
"I landed a big contract today."
"That's not what tired sounds like. That's the other kind."
I didn't correct her. My mother had spent thirty years learning to hear the difference between my voices, and I wasn't going to insult her by pretending she was wrong.
But I didn't regret it. The world had given me a choice seven months ago, and I'd chosen to be enough on my own. I'd built something. Created something. Decided what happened next.
And this — sitting across from Liam Cavanaugh, being brilliant, being professional, being the architect of his future — this was just the next phase.
First, I had a victory to celebrate.
Then, I'd figure out how to survive the next eighteen months of looking at him and smiling like we were strangers.