2. Liam #2
The Buckhead penthouse was twenty minutes away and would be empty when I got there — the full thirty-second floor, a Basquiat I'd bought at auction because it reminded me of controlled chaos, and a view I'd chosen because it matched the one from the Loews that night.
I pulled up her photo again. Studied the woman who didn't know she was pregnant in that image.
Studied the woman who did and was pretending she wasn't. Everything about her made sense, and nothing about her made sense at all.
I left my office and took the executive stairs down to the garage level — past the spot where my driver usually waited, dismissed hours ago because I'd always preferred driving myself, preferred the privacy of a car that answered only to me.
The parking garage smelled like concrete and the phantom exhaust of expensive cars.
I told myself it was coincidence. I told myself I just needed air.
Both were lies, and I didn't examine them too closely.
She emerged from the elevators with her blazer folded over one arm and a leather messenger bag slung low enough to clear her belly.
Her long braids were pulled back, with curled pieces escaping near her temples.
In the softer garage light, the gold of her earrings glowed against her deep-brown skin, but it was the care in each step that held me — the unmistakable weariness of a woman carrying something without help.
She's exhausted. The observation landed like a punch. She's been carrying this alone and she's exhausted and she walked into my office like she was fine.
"Zuri." I said it like a statement of fact, like naming her would anchor something.
She stopped walking. Around us, the garage was half-empty, evening light filtering through the metal grates in pale stripes that made her look like she was composed of shadows and gold.
She's not backing up. I noted it with something like admiration. Pregnant, exhausted, caught in a parking garage by the man whose child she's carrying, and she hasn't given up an inch of ground.
"Mr. Cavanaugh." Not a greeting. A protocol.
"Is the baby mine?"
The question hung between us, crude and necessary and impossible to take back.
I watched Zuri's shoulders move — a small shift that suggested she'd considered bolting and then decided against it.
Her eyes were dark, nearly black in the garage light, and completely opaque.
Her hand came down on top of her belly — not defensively, but like she was grounding herself through touch.
She won't lie to me. She can't. The hand on her belly is already the truth.
"No one is yours, Mr. Cavanaugh." Her gaze held mine. "But yes. Biologically, she's your daughter."
The words landed like a verdict and a fact. She was telling me that biology did not grant ownership. My jaw tightened further, and I felt my hands curl into fists at my sides — a betrayal I quickly corrected by pressing my palms flat against my thighs.
She's protecting herself. She's protecting the child I just found out exists. That's the smartest thing she could do. It's also the thing that means when I do convince her to let me in, it'll be because I've earned it, not because I've forced it.
She moved past me toward the Tesla. I didn't follow. I let her pass, let her have this decision without my body in the way of it.
Let her go. Let her drive home. Let her have this.
The Tesla's lights flickered on. She opened the driver's side door with both hands, steadying herself on the frame before she settled into the seat.
I watched the careful deliberation of someone managing her body like a complicated equation.
The small wince she tried to hide when she adjusted the seat.
But I'm not going anywhere. When she's ready — if she's ever ready — I'll be here.
She didn't look back. The door sealed with an expensive hush.
I stood perfectly still in the middle of the garage, hands at my sides, watching her back up.
She maneuvered with the same precision she'd used in the boardroom, no hesitation.
The red tail lights painted the concrete in warning as she rolled past the security gate without deviation, without any acknowledgment that I existed at all.
She was gone. She was smart to go. And I had to let her stay gone until she decided otherwise.
I turned and walked back toward the elevators, my mind already moving through what patience actually meant.
Zuri Tate didn't want to be found. She didn't want to be chased or owned or positioned into submission.
She wanted to be independent and pregnant and in control of when and how I became part of her life.
That's what she gets. Control. That's the only thing I can give her that matters.
But even as I thought it, I could feel the other impulse — the one I'd built a career on.
The instinct to manage. To call my lawyer, run a background check, put someone on it.
To turn her into a problem with a solution instead of a person with a choice.
I'd spent twenty years solving things. Acquiring things.
Structuring outcomes until they looked like inevitability.
That muscle didn't know how to rest. My father had never once, in seventy-one years, let a problem exist without trying to purchase its opposite, and I had spent my whole adult life either becoming him or performing the opposite of him so hard it amounted to the same thing — a man deciding, unilaterally, what the correct response to a woman was.
That's the version of you she'll run from. The man who solves people. You've been him your whole life and she'll see it in a heartbeat.
The recognition sat heavy. I'd have to learn something I'd never practiced: how to stand still when every instinct said move.
Back in my office, I sat at my desk and opened her contract again.
The document was thorough — every angle covered, every exit mapped.
She'd consulted someone, or she had a legal mind that anticipated problems before they became problems. She'd negotiated an eighteen-month contract with full access.
She'd built the timeline so the baby would arrive mid-contract — when the work was deep enough that walking away would cost both of us.
She knew exactly what she was doing on the page, even if she hadn't known who she was doing it to.
She thought the contract put her in control. She thought the pregnancy was something she got to negotiate without me.
And maybe she was right.
I shut down my laptop and gathered my keys.
Drove through the Atlanta evening with the city lights blurring past like possibilities, the same lights she'd worn on a balcony seven months ago.
Found myself thinking about the sound of her laugh on that balcony.
Found myself thinking about the look on her face when she'd realized who I was — that flicker of something that might have been hope before she'd buried it under professionalism.
Found myself thinking about her hands, steady even when she was exhausted, even when she was caught.
I wasn't going anywhere. Not to own her. Not to force anything. Just to be present when she decided what she wanted.
If she chose me, it would be because she'd decided to. That was the only version of this I wanted.
I could wait.