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She hadn’t been honest.
She’d made me break the one rule between Lucas and me. And if she could do that for three weeks, could she genuinely fit into our family dynamic? Could I trust her to?
The twisting in my stomach made me worry that I couldn’t.
But the sounds of quiet sobs behind the curtain begged me to.
Chapter 31
Ava
“What did he say when he came back?”
I stared at the easel on the other side of the living room and the canvas that sat atop it, half painted and abandoned for nearly three and a half weeks. I couldn’t bring myself to look at Emily, even with her sitting less than four feet from me on the other side of the coffee table with a cup of steaming hot mint tea in her palm that she’d made for herself. “Nothing,” I said, the word barely audible.
“Nothing?” she asked.
I nodded. Emily scoffed.
“I can’t believe him,” she snapped, setting down her tea a little too hastily. “Did you ask him to talk to you? Or did you just sit there, Aves?”
I winced. I wasn’t ready for a spiteful Emily today—I’d just wanted company instead of sitting alone in my apartment and crying over the volatile, fragile state of my relationship with Adrian. “I…I asked him where he wanted to go from there. He said he didn’t know.”
I watched from my peripheral vision as she pushed her hair back in frustration, her hands lingering on the sides of her head. “What the fuck?”
“I hurt him,” I croaked insistently. “I don’t blame him for not wanting to speak to me.”
“You’re carrying his child, Ava!”
I swallowed and pulled the throw blanket up over my chest. “I know.”
“And he’s more than old enough to not be acting like one,” she added.
“He’s not acting like a child. He’s acting like someone who has been hurt, and I’m trying to respect that.” The lump in my throat grew tenfold. It felt as though I could barely breathe around it, felt like I was hyperventilating, but I counted my breaths and forced myself to calm down enough to speak again, even if it was with a wobbling lower lip. “He stayed with me until they discharged me. His driver took me home. I have no idea how he got home or what happened, but it was about an hour later when my dad called asking me what happened.”
Keeping tight-lipped about what had happened had been hard, especially when I was struggling to think coherently with the way Adrian and I had left things, when Dad had called. I couldn’t tell him that my body was flooded with an excess of progesterone to the point that my blood vessels were expanding too much and directing too much blood to the baby and not quite enough to my brain. Somehow, in that hallway, my blood pressure had dropped significantly enough to cause me to pass out, and it had hovered just above that fine line between overwhelming dizziness and fainting since then.
Dad hadn’t been happy with my excuse of, “I just hadn’t gotten the chance to eat yet and my blood sugar dropped.” And he’d be furious once he realized that Adrian hadn’t contacted him the moment it happened.
Emily sighed exasperatedly, her gaze lingering on me. “I swear to God, Aves, if he just leaves you high and dry whenyou’re pregnant with his goddamn kid, I’ll storm the Darkwater building myself.”
I shook my head and wiped my eyes with the back of my hand, the smallest sob breaking through and shaking my chest. “I don’t want him to do that but he already has one he needs to look after,” I insisted. “I have to be careful.”
Her head dropped in frustration.
“I need to tell my dad,” I said hoarsely. “I can’t hide this forever and my stomach is getting bigger every goddamn day, it feels like.”
Slowly, I turned to look at Emily as silence crept over her. Her blonde hair fell in perfectly styled ringlets around her cheeks today, her makeup nicely done, her clothes casually professional. I felt like a mess in comparison in my paint-and-tear-stained pajamas and unwashed hair as she lifted her head just enough to stare directly at me. “You know he’ll question whose it is.”
I gulped. “I know.”
“And you want to just outright tell him it’s his best friend’s?”
There wasn’t a single part of me that wanted to do it without Adrian beside me, but with every passing hour that he didn’t reach out, my mind was spiraling toward the idea that he wouldn’t want to do that. I wasn’t even sure if he wanted to be near me right now, and considering he was the one who had insisted weeks ago that we take it a bit slower and put off telling my father, I couldn’t see a future where he’d agree to that just because I was pregnant.
But I was only going to get bigger. And I worked on the same floor of the same building as Dad.
“No,” I choked. “I want to do it with him.”
