The Billionaire's Choice

Decisions, Decisions.

The doctor was a woman in her fifties with reading glasses pushed up on her forehead and the manner of someone who had long since stopped softening news she could not change.

She sat down. She looked at Jade directly.

"Your HCG levels are elevated," she said.

"Significantly. Based on the levels and your last cycle, I'd estimate approximately six weeks."

Jade heard the words.

Processed them one at a time, the way you processed something your brain was initially refusing to file correctly.

Six weeks.

The gala had been six weeks ago.

"Are you certain?" she asked.

"We'll confirm with an ultrasound," the doctor said. "But yes. The blood work is unambiguous."

Jade nodded once.

The doctor asked several questions in the careful, unhurried way of someone checking a checklist, support system, living situation, whether this was.... expected.

Jade answered each question in a steady voice that she was faintly impressed by, given that her entire internal architecture was currently undergoing a rapid and unauthorized renovation.

The doctor left her with a pamphlet and a follow-up appointment card, and the particular tact of someone who understood that some people needed to be alone with information before they could do anything useful with it.

Jade set the pamphlet face down on the bed.

She looked at the clock.

Forty minutes had passed since Ryan's call.

She looked at her phone.

Nothing.

She told herself traffic. The West Side at this time could add twenty minutes easily.

She told herself a call had come in that he was handling the car, a fire that needed exactly three minutes of his attention before he handed it off and kept driving.

She told herself the seventeen rational explanations that existed for a man running nine minutes late.

She waited.

An hour passed.

The nurse came to check her fluids. Asked if her emergency contact was coming. Jade said yes and smiled the smile she had built for exactly these uncomfortable situations, warm, unbothered, a smile that foreclosed further questions, and the nurse left, and the room was white and quiet again.

Her phone screen lit up.

She reached for it with a speed that embarrassed her.

It was a board member. Something about the Tokyo numbers. Could she access the revised brief?

She set the phone down.

Looked at the ceiling.

Two hours.

She thought about what she knew about Ryan Cole.

Not the version she performed, not caring about it at her desk. The real version, the one she had assembled over six years of proximity and attention and the particular intimacy of being the person who knew everything about someone's professional life and far too much about their human one.

Ryan did not fail because he was cruel.

He failed because he had spent so long choosing what he could afford to lose that he had lost the ability to recognize what he couldn't.

He would have meant it. She did not doubt that.

When he said I'm coming in that stripped-down voice with the last of his control already gone, he had meant every syllable.

And then something happened. A call, a crisis, a number on his screen that represented millions of dollars or a collapsing deal or an acquisition in jeopardy, and Ryan had made the calculation he always made, the one so deeply embedded in him now it probably didn't even feel like a choice anymore.

He had chosen the thing he was certain about over the thing that frightened him.

Three hours after his call, he texted.

Something came up. Are you alright?

Jade read it twice.

Then she put the phone down on the bed beside her and looked at the pamphlet the doctor had left, looked at the ultrasound appointment card, and looked at the IV in the back of her hand, and felt the last warm thing inside her go very quietly cold.

She was alone in a hospital bed.

She was six weeks pregnant.

And the father had just sent her a text message.

She picked up the phone.

She did not reply to Ryan.

She called Maya instead.

"I need you to come get me," she said when her friend answered.

"And I need you to not ask me anything until we're in the car."

"I'm already grabbing my keys," Maya said.

Jade exhaled.

"There's one more thing."

"What?"

"I think I might have to disappear."

The silence at Maya's end lasted exactly two seconds. Maya, to her eternal credit, did not ask why. She had known Jade long enough to understand that there were questions that came later and actions that came first.

"I'll be there in twenty minutes," she said.

She was.

Unlike some people.