The mistake that made us

Chapter 3

I knew something was wrong before the taxi turned onto my street.

The gate was crowded. Cameras. Microphones. People jostling for position, and the moment one of them spotted me stepping out of the taxi the whole mass surged forward at once.

"Ashley, who's the father—"

"Can you confirm the pregnancy—"

"There she is—"

I stopped. "Where did you get this."

A woman shoved a microphone toward my face. "Someone saw you leaving the gynaecologist's office. Can you confirm you are pregnant?"

The doctor with the warm smile and the congratulations. Of course.

"I have nothing to say." I started pushing through.

"We understand your fiancé has never been intimate with you—"

"Sources say the engagement is already over—"

I stopped hearing them. I kept moving, shoulder down, until I was through the gate and inside the house and the door was shut behind me.

My father was sitting on the couch.

He had a belt in his hands.

Lizzy was already there, settled beside Bianca with the ease of someone who had been home for hours and had made good use of every minute. The small satisfied curve of her mouth told me exactly what she had spent that time doing.

"Aren't you tired," my father said, rising slowly, "of embarrassing this family."

"Dad—"

"First the marks on your neck. Now this." He gestured toward me with the belt, casual, almost conversational. "Who is the father."

"I do not know." The words felt like swallowing glass. "I have told you. I do not remember that night. Something was done to me. I woke up in a room I did not recognise and I—"

"So you are carrying a child and you cannot name the father."

"It was one night. Something happened to me—"

"Were you blindfolded?" Bianca did not look up from her nails. Light. Curious. As though she were asking about the weather.

I did not answer. There was no answer that would help.

"Mark." My father's voice dropped. He turned to the guard by the door. "Hold her."

"Dad." My voice broke before I could stop it. "Please. Please do not—"

The guard's hands closed around my arms from behind. I struggled but it made no difference. He was twice my size and I had nothing left. I heard Bianca say something about the pregnancy, something about being careful. I heard Lizzy echo it. Neither of them meant it. They were pouring petrol and calling it caution.

"I am sorry." The words came out in pieces. I did not even know anymore what I was apologising for. For existing, probably. For failing to be whatever he had needed after my mother left. For being the wrong shape, the wrong size, the wrong everything.

He looked at me for a very long moment.

Then he turned to the guard and said, simply, "Take her upstairs and lock it."

I breathed out in relief. The guard pulled me upright and his hand closed around my arm and I was walked to the stairs the way you walk a child, firmly, without discussion, my feet finding each step while my head stayed dizzy from the exhaustion of everything.

The door locked behind me.

I sat on the edge of the bed and stared at the floor. A knock came an hour later, tentative, and one of the maids stepped inside looking like she wished she were anywhere else.

"Someone is here to see you," she said. "A man. He is waiting at the back. He said to be discreet."

I made my way to the garden slowly, every movement an argument with my body. In the far corner where the light from the house barely reached, a shape stood still.

"Whoever you are," I said, stopping a few feet short, "come out please."

"My apologies." A man stepped forward. Slight. Professional. Glasses. The kind of person who had made an art of being unremarkable. "I wanted to be careful."

"Who are you."

"My name is David. I represent someone who has asked me to come to you with a proposal." He paused, measuring something. "We are aware of your pregnancy. My employer is prepared to offer you five million dollars in exchange for the child after it is born."

The silence lasted exactly two seconds.

"What." Barely a sound.

"I understand how that—"

"Do you." My hand had gone to my stomach. "Do you understand how that sounds, because from where I am standing you just asked me to hand over my baby."

"Not to a stranger," he said. Something in his tone shifted, slightly, carefully. "To the father."

I went still. "Say that again."

"My employer believes he is the father of your child. The timeline corresponds. He is aware of what occurred that night and he is trying, in the way available to him, to do right by the child."

I looked at him. "How do I know you are telling the truth."

"What would convince you."

I thought about the dark hotel room. The one thing I had actually seen. "Does he have a tattoo."

"A dragon," David said. "Upper back."

The ground shifted slightly under my feet. That detail was in no article. No photograph, no gossip column, no report anywhere had mentioned it. The only person alive who could have told him that was someone who had been in that room.

"Even so," I said, and I was surprised by how steady my voice was. "He is still a stranger. And I am not selling my child to a stranger."

David reached into his jacket and produced a card. Held it out without pressure. "If you change your mind."

I took it. He nodded and walked back into the dark, and I stood alone for a moment with the card in my hand and the night air cold around me.

I was nearly back to my room when I heard the voices.

Two doors down. My father's study. I should have kept walking. I knew even as I slowed that I should have kept walking, but something in his tone made my feet stop.

"She has to get rid of it." My father's voice. Flat and certain. "That child cannot stay in this house."

"And if she refuses?" Bianca.

"Then she does not get a choice." A pause. "I will drag her to the hospital myself. Or put something in her food. Either way, that child does not come into this house."

I pressed myself against the wall and breathed carefully.

"Why is she even still here," Bianca said, her voice taking on the quality of something she had been waiting to say for a long time. "Her mother has been gone for years. Why do we keep her."

"You know why."

"Because of what her mother told you? Darling, a dying woman tells stories to secure her child a future. She could have made the whole thing up."

"She did not make it up." His voice dropped. Careful. "You did not see her. The way she carried herself. The things she had with her. She came from real money. And when whoever she came from eventually comes looking—"

"You want to be in a position to negotiate."

He said nothing. Which was its own answer.

I pushed myself off the wall and walked. Not ran.

My mother had come to this house with money and a secret and a child, and Nicholas Whitmore had taken us in as an investment. Never out of love. Everything made sense now and I wished with everything in me that it did not.

He was going to force me to end my pregnancy.

I sat on the edge of my bed in the dark and let myself feel the full weight of that for exactly as long as it took to understand it.

Then I found my phone on the nightstand, found the card in my pocket, and typed the number slowly.

This is Ashley. I accept your offer.

The message delivered immediately. Three dots appeared.

Meet me at Cross Bridge Station. Nine a.m. tomorrow.

Okay, I typed back, and set the phone face down on the bed.

I had just agreed to give my child to a stranger. It was still the most rational decision I had made all day. But as I lay back in the dark and stared at the ceiling, one thought kept circling back, quiet and persistent and impossible to shake.

What if the stranger turned out to be worse than what I was running from.