The mistake that made us

Chapter 2

Ashley's POV

Two months later, and I still could not smell coffee without my stomach turning.

I made it to the bathroom in time. Barely.

When I came back, wiping my mouth and deeply humiliated, Kim was leaning against the counter with her arms folded and the expression she wore when she already knew the answer and was giving me the grace of arriving at it myself.

"Ashley," she said carefully. "When did you last have your period."

I opened my mouth. Closed it.

"My cycles are irregular," I said. "You know that."

"I know." Her voice was steady. Patient. "When was the last one."

I thought about it. Then I thought about it more carefully. And the number I arrived at made the floor feel unreliable under my feet.

"Two months ago," I said.

The word I did not say out loud sat between us anyway, filling up all the available space.

"Do not jump ahead of yourself," Kim said gently. "Go to the hospital. Get checked. Then we know what we are dealing with."

I nodded. Whatever appetite I had left was completely gone.

The waiting room at the hospital had the particular quality of places where people sit with things they are not ready to know. I held my numbered ticket and tried not to think, which meant I thought about nothing else.

What if I was pregnant. What would I tell my father. What would I tell Luke. And underneath all of those questions, the one I had been refusing to look at directly for two months, the one I had been circling at a careful distance. Whose baby would it even be.

The doctor was warm and unhurried, the kind of person who makes difficult things feel manageable by the way she moves through a room. She walked me through everything without fuss and told me to sit tight.

I stared at the wall.

When she came back she was smiling, and something in my body already knew. Something had known for weeks. Knowing and believing are two entirely different things. Knowing lives in the stomach and believing lives in the mind, and my mind had been refusing the evidence my body had been quietly collecting.

"Congratulations," she said, and held out the result.

My hands trembled when I took it. I read the words. Then again.

Two months pregnant.

I do not remember leaving the examination room. I do not remember the corridor or the lobby or pushing through the doors to the street. One moment I was sitting with the paper in my hands and the next I was outside on the pavement in the afternoon light with no memory of the steps in between.

My hand moved to my stomach before I decided to put it there. I pulled it back quickly, the way you pull back from something hot.

Luke. Whatever had happened that night, whatever I could not remember, he had been there. He was the beginning of it. And he had not answered a single call in two months, not since the night of the hotel, when I had woken to three missed calls from him and a message that said only: last night got out of hand, let's not mention it.

I opened my bag and found my phone. His name sat at the top of my favourites like an accusation.

He did not pick up.

I flagged down a taxi.

I knew the building. I had been there enough times that the doorman recognised me and waved me straight through, which I was grateful for because I was not certain I had the composure to explain myself.

The elevator up felt too fast. I stood outside his door steadying myself, rehearsing words that kept falling apart before I finished them. Luke, I need to tell you something. Luke, I need to ask you something. Luke, I think you—

The door was open. Not wide, just slightly ajar, the way it gets when someone has not pulled it properly behind them.

I pushed it open.

Clothes on the living room floor. A heel I recognised. A jacket I recognised but could not immediately place. I stood there trying to work it out, my brain moving slowly through something it did not want to reach the end of.

I walked further in.

The sounds from the bedroom were muffled but unmistakable.

I pushed the door open.

My hand flew to my mouth.

Luke. And Lizzy. Tangled together in his sheets, so absorbed in each other that the door opening had not registered. I stood there in complete stillness, the world narrowed down to this single frame, and for a long terrible moment I simply could not move.

"Luke."

He froze. Turned. In the half second before the panic crossed his face I saw something else. Guilt, yes, but not the guilt of a man devastated by what he had done. The guilt of a man sorry he had been caught. There is a difference and my body knew it before my mind did.

He scrambled upright, reaching for his clothes. "What are you doing here—"

"That is what you are going with."

"Ashley—"

"I just walked in on you and my sister and the first thing you said to me was what are you doing here."

He had his boxers on now, one hand running through his hair, eyes moving everywhere except my face. Behind him, Lizzy sat up and pulled the duvet around herself, and I watched her arrange her expression into something that on another person might have been remorse. On Lizzy it looked like arrival. Like she had been waiting for this exact moment and was finally comfortable.

"You were not supposed to find out like this," Luke said.

"Find out like this." I said it slowly, tasting each word. "So there was a better way you had planned to tell me."

"It has been almost a year," Lizzy said from the bed. Her voice was completely flat, the way it got when she had decided something was already finished. "Since you are here you may as well know everything."

"Lizzy—"

"She has already seen us, Luke. What exactly are we protecting?" She looked at me then. "Almost a year, Ashley. And it was never going to stop."

I had known, somewhere under everything, that I did not love Luke the way I was supposed to. But I had believed he was safe. I had believed that much. I had built something on that belief and I could feel it coming down around me in complete silence.

"I thought you loved me," I said, and I hated how small it came out.

Lizzy laughed. Not cruelly. Casually, which was worse. "Love. Ashley, look at yourself."

"Lizzy—"

"No." She stood, arms folded. "I want her to hear this. What man do you honestly think chooses you? You have gained weight. You dress like you have given up. You walk around like you are apologising for existing. Luke did not choose you. Your father arranged you. There is a difference."

The tears came and I let them. I was done spending energy holding myself together in front of people who had already decided what they thought of me.

"Is that true," I said to Luke. "You only agreed to the engagement because of the families."

He had the grace to look uncomfortable. "My family wanted the alliance. And you were going through so much after your mother died. I felt—"

"You felt sorry for me."

He did not deny it.

I wiped my face with the back of my hand and took one slow breath. "Two months ago. The hotel. Did you set that up."

The silence that followed was its own answer.

Luke sat down on the edge of the bed and I watched something shift in his face. The decision to explain. The particular confidence of someone who had always believed his logic made him reasonable. "It was supposed to be simple. We needed grounds to end the engagement without the fallout landing on my family. Photos of you with someone else would have been clean. No scandal, no drama. But you ended up in the wrong room and by the time we found you there was nothing usable."

I stood very still. "Nothing usable."

"It was not personal, Ashley. It was—"

I left.

I did not slam the door. I did not say another word. I simply turned and walked out of the bedroom and through the apartment and out into the hallway and I kept walking until the elevator closed around me and I was finally, mercifully, alone with what I now knew.

They had drugged me. They had put me in a room with a stranger. And when it had not gone to their plan they had simply moved on.

And somewhere in the wreckage of that night I had gotten pregnant by a man whose face I never even saw.

I ended up at a children's playground. I do not know exactly how. I sat on a bench and cried the way I had not let myself cry since my mother's funeral, the kind that starts somewhere underneath everything else and does not care who witnesses it. Around me, children shrieked and chased each other across the equipment and the world went about its afternoon as though nothing had happened.

The sun was going orange by the time the tears ran out. I found a food cart and bought something I could not identify and ate it on the walk back to the road without tasting it.

I had a baby. I had a baby by a man whose name I did not know, in a body that had already decided to keep going whether I was ready or not.

I pressed my palm flat against my stomach as the taxi indicator clicked.

Whatever you are, I thought. None of this is your fault.

But I was already dreading what came next, because I had a secret now that was going to grow too large to hide. And I had absolutely nowhere safe to take it.