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He watched me for a moment, his gaze hard and unnerving, before looking away. “Was.”
Everything in my mind came to a screeching, crashing halt. The sinking feeling was worse, now, and it felt as if the ground beneath me had cracked and split, eating me whole. That single word hung in the air, sharp and final. Was. He didn’t want to be with me anymore. He was giving up.
“Your father told me that he would ruin me if I got within a hundred feet of you again. And I don’t doubt him for a second,” he said, squinting his eyes just barely as he looked toward the overcast sky, forcing his crow’s feet to deepen. “I’m taking that risk right now, but I can’t again. Not when everything I’ve worked for, everything I have, everything Lucas has, is on the line.”
My chest tightened, the breath caught in my throat, and the sting of tears pressed hard behind my eyes, but I couldn’t move, couldn’t speak. A choked sound left me, but that was all I could get out.
“I don’t know if you thought he’d come around or if this was what you wanted, Ava, but either way, I can't fight this. I can't fight him.” His throat moved as he swallowed, his gaze slowly moving back to mine. “This is over.”
Instinctively, my hand moved to my stomach and the little bump that was barely visible through my double layer of jackets.
It felt like I’d been kicked.
“I’ll talk to him,” I croaked, the sting of cold air feeling harsher against the trails of tears that freely came now. If a passerby saw and looked at me strangely, I wouldn’t have noticed—I was so focused on Adrian that it was as if everything else melted away. “Let me talk to him, please. I can fix this. All of it.”
He shook his head and took a further step back, his eyes glancing down at the hand on my stomach. He winced. “It wouldn’t help.”
“It would. It would. Please, Adrian, don’t do this.” The words were broken, battered. Everything about me felt raw, from my throat to my heart to my brain. Nothing felt okay. Nothing.
“Even if I could bring myself to be with someone who has lied to me twice now,” he scoffed, “you and I both know that when your father sets his mind to something, it’s not changing.”
I didn’t want to accept the potential truth in what he’d said about my dad. “I haven’t lied,” I sputtered, my breath hitching with each word. “I’ve admitted over and over that I should have told you sooner, and I’ve apologized just as much. But I didn’t do this. I didn’t. I’m fucking pregnant, Adrian, do you think I’d want him to hate you in the midst of that?”
Another step back, and he was further than arm’s reach. He looked away again and it felt as though he were ripping my goddamn heart from my chest.
“Do you expect me to do this alone?” I sobbed. I truly, wholeheartedly couldn’t give a shit if everyone could hear me, if everyone was judging me. Tourists would come and go. This was too big for that. “Do you want that?”
For the briefest, fleeting second, his lower lip trembled. “I will help you, Ava, and I will take care of the baby in the way I need to as a father once we know that David won’t literally cut off my head for it. But that doesn’t change anything.” He took one more step back, almost hesitating. “I’m sorry.”
Before I could get another word out, he was halfway across the park.
Chapter 34
Adrian
I’d never been one to disassociate often, or even at all. My first real episode with it had come the moment I’d learned about Jan’s death and I went into overdrive to handle it. I’d gone in and out of fits of shock the weeks and months after, somehow managing to get work done and be a parent despite it, even when it felt as if I were taking a backseat in my head and letting someone else control my body.
But now, as I sat on the floor against the wall of windows in my office, still wearing my coat and my hands frozen from my walk back from the park, I was gone entirely.
It was as if I wasn’t even in my body anymore. Everything around me—the office, the floor, the plants, the mumbling of high-ranking staff passing by my door, my own heartbeat—felt distant, muffled, as if I were watching it all through a dusty, fogged-up window. I blinked, trying to recenter myself, but nothing I could see felt real anymore. My hands, my body, my breath felt so far away that it was like I was drifting away, somewhere safer where the weight of everything couldn’t touch me.
I knew I should feel something. I knew I should force myself, somehow, back into reality. But there was only what was beforeme and the feeling of an empty, hollow space. All of the graves were dug up, and Jan’s fingers had pulled me underneath the rotten soil, burying me instead of all of my problems.
I needed to work. I needed to prep for the next event, I needed to triple-check every choice the teams below me had made, I needed to do outreach to ensure that the companies signed on still wanted to work with me despite our catastrophic failings recently.
But I also needed her, and that was the most horrific realization.
A little over three months was too quick to go from barely knowing someone, to needing them to function. And somehow, against my better judgment, I’d let it happen.
I was right back where I’d been two years ago.
When I finally got the energy to move, it wasn’t because I’d told myself to or intentionally piloted my body. I just…went from sitting one second, to standing the next, and back to sitting again in the plush seat at my desk. The screen from my laptop lit the darkening space, and it was only then that I realized that somehow, in all of this, the sun had set between the skyscrapers.
I’d done nothing.
The moment I had the tiniest drop of clarity, I called Grace, asked her to stay with Lucas. I’d take the angry meltdown from him later about missing the new episode of our show tonight, I’d deal with the minor fall out and handle what I could. I just…couldn’t go home. I couldn’t face my son like this.
A knock on my door pulled me toward the surface, briefly, again.
