Chapter 6: She Can't Let Rowan Hartwell Know She's Pregnant
1298 Words
Clang.
The prison door sealed shut with a sound that Vivienne felt in her bones.
She stood very still for exactly three seconds.
Then she started pounding.
"Let me out!" Her fists hit the iron door again and again, her voice already going raw. "Rowan Hartwell, I didn't push her! I'm innocent, I didn't do anything! Let me out! Where is Lily? What have you done with my daughter?"
The only response was laughter.
Low, unhurried, and very deliberate.
"So this is her." A woman's voice, somewhere behind her. "The one who killed his baby and still has the nerve to scream."
"He said to take *good care* of her." Another voice. The phrase landed with quotation marks Vivienne could hear. "I'd say we're just following instructions."
She turned.
Four women. Maybe five. Rolling sleeves up with the practiced ease of people who had done this before.
Rowan sent them.
The realization hit her at the same moment the first blow did.
She went down fast, curling instinctively, arms over her head, hands pressed to her abdomen, body folding around that one possibility she hadn't yet confirmed. She didn't know if it was instinct or hope or something that lived between the two. She just held on.
Time stopped making sense after that.
When it was over, Vivienne crouched in the corner of the cell, back against the cold wall, cheek against her knees.
Her face was cut. Her ribs ached with every breath. Her lip had split somewhere along the way and the blood had dried into something stiff and metallic at the corner of her mouth.
She didn't cry immediately.
She counted her breaths instead. In. Out. In. Out.
And then, quietly, because there was no one left to be strong for, the tears came.
Sixteen years. She had loved Rowan Hartwell for sixteen years. Through every version of him, the boy he'd been, the man he'd become, the stranger he was now.
And this was what that love had built.
A prison cell. A bruised body. And somewhere out there, a sick little girl who needed her mother.
The nausea arrived without warning, and this time there was nothing left to hold back.
She fainted with her hand still pressed flat against her stomach.
---
Three days passed.
No medical ward. No doctor. Just the cell, and the fever that climbed steadily until Vivienne stopped being able to tell what was real and what wasn't.
On the fourth morning, the door opened.
"Ms. Cole."
She looked up slowly. Her vision swam, then steadied.
Adrian, Rowan's personal assistant, meticulous and unreadable, stood in the doorway with the careful expression of someone delivering news they hadn't been warned about.
"Is it Lily?" Her voice came out as a scrape. She pushed herself upright, wounds pulling, every muscle protesting. "What happened to Lily?"
"Lily is stable," he said quickly. "It's Grandpa Edmund. He's had a health crisis. Mr. Hartwell wants you released."
"What kind of crisis? What happened to him?"
Adrian hesitated. "He dreamed that you and Mr. Hartwell were divorcing. He... couldn't handle it. He collapsed. He's been asking for you by name."
Vivienne was already on her feet.
---
The Old Hartwell Estate — Long Island
Edmund was sitting up by the time she arrived, propped against pillows, a cup of tea going cold on the nightstand.
When he saw her, his face folded into something between relief and worry.
"Vivienne. My God, look at you. What happened? You've lost so much weight and your face" He reached out and cupped her jaw carefully. "Is Rowan treating you badly? Tell me the truth."
Vivienne's eyes burned.
This man. This frail, silver-haired man who remembered a version of the world that no longer existed, whose first thought, even half-delirious from a health scare, was whether she was okay.
She felt Rowan's gaze on her from across the room before she even looked up.
Cold. Warning. Don't.
She pulled her lips into something that resembled a smile.
"I've been trying to eat less, Grandpa. You know how it is." She covered his hand with hers. "And I tripped. Clumsy as ever. Rowan scolds me for it constantly." A breath. "He takes very good care of me. I promise."
Edmund let out a long, disgruntled sound. "Eating less! You're already disappearing! How are you going to give me great-grandchildren if there's nothing left of you?"
Vivienne laughed despite herself, short and real, the way only Edmund ever managed to pull out of her.
"I'll eat more, Grandpa. You have my word. But only if you follow the doctor's orders."
"My health will sort itself out the moment you two give me a great-grandchild to hold," the old man said stubbornly.
A bitter wave moved through Vivienne's chest.
If only you knew, she thought. If only you knew there's already a little girl who has your great-grandson's eyes.
"We're working on it, Grandpa." Rowan's voice came from behind her, quiet, composed, and utterly convincing. "I expect we'll have good news before long."
Edmund lit up like a man thirty years younger. "Your father will be overjoyed when he hears"
The room shifted.
Vivienne glanced at Rowan. His expression had closed down entirely, a muscle working in his jaw.
Edmund didn't know. He'd forgotten. His mind had sealed off the part of his memory where Dominic Hartwell had died and in its place, it had constructed a softer fiction where his son was simply away, living well somewhere distant, and would come home one day.
Rowan said nothing.
He simply sat with the weight of it.
After Edmund was settled and asleep, Rowan found her in the hallway.
He didn't waste words.
"You stay here. You take care of him. If he has another episode because of something you did" he let the sentence end where it was.
Vivienne met his gaze steadily. "I won't go back to prison?"
"I can put you back whenever I choose." His eyes moved over her, the cuts, the bruises, the shadows under her eyes, and something shifted briefly in his expression before disappearing. "You look pathetic."
"I'd like to see Lily."
"No."
"Rowan." She kept her voice even. "She's four years old. She doesn't understand any of this. She's sick and she needs her mother. Whatever you think I did, she had nothing to do with it. Please."
He looked at her for a long moment.
"Three days in prison clearly wasn't enough of a lesson."
"You nearly had me killed." The words came out before she could stop them. Not loud. Just true.
Something moved behind his eyes.
"Lily has leukemia," Vivienne continued, quieter now. "She needs specialized care. She's spent more time in hospitals than out of them. I'm not asking you for mercy for myself. I'm asking you for her. She'll die, Rowan. Without me there, she will die."
A silence stretched between them.
Then "The child is alive. That's more than she deserves given what her mother did." His jaw tightened. "Take care of Grandpa. Don't give me a reason to change my mind."
He left without looking back.
Vivienne leaned against the wall and let it hold her weight for a moment.
She thought of Lily. Of the hospital room. Of the monitors.
She thought of Celeste's smile.
And then the nausea swept through her again, hard and unmistakable and Vivienne pressed her hand to her stomach and stood very still.
Before prison, she had only suspected.
Three days of fever and beatings later, she needed to know for certain.
And if she was, if there was a life beginning inside her right now, against all odds, despite everything
Rowan Hartwell could never find out.
Not until she had something to protect herself with.
She needed a pregnancy test.
- Writer
