THE REGRET THAT BOUND HER

CHAPTER 6

Emily's POV

My friendship with Steve grew quietly, the way good things tend to grow without fanfare, without a clear moment I could point to and say “that was when it changed.”

He checked on me often. He showed up, was the simplest way to put it. And after years of people who left, someone who consistently showed up felt like something close to extraordinary.

I started to wonder about my own feelings. Whether I was falling for someone real, or whether I was simply falling for the first person who had made me feel safe. There is a difference, and I knew it. I just wasn’t sure which one it was.

Am I so starved of care that kindness alone is enough to break me open?

I wanted to be careful.

I’d been careless once, and it had cost me everything. But Steve was patient in a way that made caution difficult. He didn’t rush me. He didn’t make me feel like I owed him anything for the kindness he gave.

He simply… waited.And slowly, I began to wait too for his footsteps on the stairs, for his knock, for the sound of his voice through the door.I told myself it was nothing.The lie was getting harder to maintain.

• • •

It was during this stretch of quiet hope that Steve first brought up the idea of the two of us.

We were at a restaurant ; a low-lit place near the university that did good pasta and bad coffee. We’d been there an hour when my stomach announced with no subtlety whatsoever, that something was wrong.

I leaned over the table. I didn’t make it to the bathroom.In the aftermath, sitting pale and mortified in a chair near the exit while Steve settled the bill I hadn’t ordered anything from, I finally said the words I’d been holding back for weeks.

I was pregnant.

Steve went very still.He’d driven me home in silence, walked me to the door, and said nothing beyond “Get some rest.” I’d assumed that was the end of it — that he’d quietly disappear from my life the way people tend to when things get complicated.He didn’t.

Three days later, he was at the door.“I’ve been thinking,” he said, coming inside. He sat across from me and looked me in the eye. “I still want to be with you. I want to date you. I think about marrying you.”My heart did something complicated.

“But…”

I heard the word before he said it.

“Could you end the pregnancy? We could start fresh. Just the two of us.”

The warmth drained out of the room.

“No.” The word came quietly, but it came without hesitation.

“It’s against everything I believe in. This baby is still my baby. It doesn’t matter how it came to be.”

Steve nodded slowly. He tried again over the following days. Different angles, softer tones. My answer didn’t change.

But something else did.I began to notice things. The way his phone screen turned face-down whenever he sat near me. The vague answers when I asked where he’d been. The quiet conversations between him and Kate that stopped whenever I walked into a room.I told myself I was imagining it.I wasn’t.

• • •

It was Evelyn who saved me.Evelyn was the quiet one, Kate’s maid, barely twenty, blonde and blue-eyed and so unassuming that people forgot she was in the room.

Which, as it turned out, was exactly why she heard things they thought were private.

She found me in the garden one afternoon and crouched down beside me with the kind of urgency that doesn’t leave room for questions.

“Emily. You need to hear something.”

She had overheard Kate and Steve in the kitchen that morning.

They’d planned it carefully: a powder mixed into my tea that evening.

Something to make me sleep.

Something to make me lose the baby. They would say it was an accident. A cruel twist of fate.

No one would question it.

I sat in the garden for a long time after Evelyn finished speaking.

The cinnamon-and-honey kitchen Kate’s hands rubbing circles on my back.

Her voice: “We’ll sort this out together.”

That evening, I sat at Kate’s table and wrapped both hands around my mug while Evelyn watched from across the room.

I brought it to my lips. I did not drink.The next morning, when Steve and Kate came downstairs and found me standing in the kitchen, fully upright, holding a piece of toast, the looks on their faces told me everything I needed to confirm.

“I know what you did,” I said. “I know what you put in my tea. And I know you’ve been waiting for me to fall.”

Kate’s face went white. Steve looked at the floor.“I’m still standing.”

I left the kitchen, went to my room, and began to pack.This time, I didn’t look back.