CHAPTER 3 — Six Weeks
1916 Words
The weeks between the positive test and the moment I sat in Dr. Patricia Webb’s office were the longest of my life.
I told no one.
Not my father — who was kind and gentle and completely ineffective in a crisis. Not my friends — both of them across the country and both of them in the middle of their own complicated lives. And certainly not Stella, who had been watching me with increasing intensity since the morning I came home from the gala, who asked careful pointed questions at dinner twice a week, who had the specific quality of someone assembling a picture from pieces she hadn’t yet acquired all of.
I went to work. I planned events — a corporate retreat in Boca Raton, a birthday party for a client who wanted a Great Gatsby theme and had the budget to actually achieve it. I ate carefully. Slept carefully. Moved through my days with the specific controlled focus of someone managing a large secret in a small house.
At night I researched.
I researched everything. What it meant to be pregnant at twenty-three with no partner and an entry-level salary and a complicated living situation. What the Romano family actually was — the deeper reading, the court documents, the investigative journalism pieces that had been published and then quietly disappeared. What Dante Romano specifically had done with his legitimate businesses, which were extensive and apparently extremely well run.
And sometimes, in the quiet of my room after midnight, I would look at his photograph and try to reconcile the man in those articles with the man who had pressed his forehead against mine in the dark and said I don’t know your last name.
I couldn’t.
He was both things. I had to accept that.
The morning of my appointment I woke before my alarm and lay in the Miami dawn listening to the city begin its day and made the decision I had been circling for six weeks.
I was keeping the baby.
I knew it the way you know certain things — not from reasoning or calculation but from the specific certainty of something that is simply true. The moment I let myself feel it fully rather than managing it from a clinical distance it became irreversible. I was twenty-three and underpaid and living with a stepsister who hated me and a father who noticed nothing. None of that changed the fact that this was my child.
Mine.
I got dressed and drove to Dr. Webb’s office.
The ultrasound room was small and quiet. The lights were low. Dr. Webb was thorough and warm and did not make me feel stupid for any of the questions I asked, of which there were many.
And then she turned the monitor toward me.
I heard the heartbeat before I fully processed what I was looking at.
Small. Fast. Impossibly, furiously alive.
I pressed my lips together and breathed.
“Everything looks perfectly healthy,” Dr. Webb said. “You’re approximately six weeks along. Everything is exactly where it should be.”
I looked at the small rapid flicker on the screen.
Six weeks.
The night of the gala. The hotel suite. The man with the dark eyes who had left aspirin and water and disappeared into the Miami dawn.
“Are you alright?” Dr. Webb asked.
“Yes,” I said. And it was true. Completely and surprisingly true. The decision I had made that morning had become, in the presence of that heartbeat, entirely and permanently settled. “Yes. I’m keeping it.”
She gave me the folder with the information and the schedule of appointments. I walked out into the Miami morning with my hand over my still-flat stomach and the specific feeling of someone who has committed fully to something enormous and terrifying and right.
I called a car.
My phone rang as I was waiting.
Unknown number.
I answered on the second ring.
“Is this Mia Collins?”
A man’s voice. Professional. Neutral.
“Who is this?” I said.
“My name is Marco Vitali. I work for Dante Romano.” A pause that was calculated to communicate nothing. “Mr. Romano would like to meet with you at your earliest convenience. He has a car available.”
I stood on the pavement outside the obstetrics clinic with the ultrasound photograph in my folder and the news of my pregnancy nine minutes old and a man whose name I had only recently learned calling me through his assistant.
He had found me.
“How did you get this number?” I said.
“Mr. Romano is thorough,” Marco said pleasantly.
“Tell Mr. Romano,” I said, keeping my voice very steady, “that I’ll contact him when I’m ready.”
I hung up.
My hands were not shaking. I made a specific point of noting this.
I looked at the folder in my hand.
Then I called the car service and went home.
He had found me. He was looking. He didn’t know about the baby yet — couldn’t know, it was too soon.
But he was going to.
And I needed to decide exactly how and when and on whose terms that conversation was going to happen.
Because I was not going to let Dante Romano — or anyone else — set the terms of something this important.
This was my life. My child. My decision.
I kept that in mind all the way home.
I kept it in mind right up until I walked through the front door and found Stella in the kitchen with her phone and her cold assessing eyes and a smile that told me she already knew something she shouldn’t.
“You went to the doctor,” she said.
Not a question.
My stomach dropped.
“An obstetrics clinic,” Stella continued. Her voice was soft. The softness was worse than the sharp version. “Dr. Patricia Webb. On Brickell Avenue.”
I stood very still.
“You had me followed,” I said.
“I’ve been worried about you,” she said. She set her phone down on the counter. Tilted her head. That smile. That specific terrible smile. “Obstetrics, Mia. That’s a very specific kind of doctor.”
I said nothing.
The silence was the answer she needed.
Something moved across Stella’s face. Something complex and rapid — fury, calculation, jealousy, something that might in another person have been hurt. It settled quickly into the specific controlled coldness she used when she had made a decision.
“You’re pregnant,” she said. “Dante Romano’s baby.”
I found my voice. “You don’t know—”
“I know everything,” she said. She stood. “I know you were in his suite that night because I was watching. I know you came home at six in the morning. I know you’ve been researching him for six weeks because I went through your laptop.” Her voice was perfectly even. “I know you’re pregnant and I know whose it is because I know you, Mia. I know you’ve never been with anyone.” She walked toward me slowly. “You’re carrying the heir to the Romano empire.”
I held my ground. Made myself hold it.
“What do you want?” I said.
“What I’ve always wanted,” she said. She stopped in front of me. Close. “Dante Romano. And you are going to help me get him.” She let that land. “You’re going to meet him. You’re going to tell him about the baby. You’re going to make it clear you want nothing — no relationship, no claim on him, nothing except support for the child. And then you’re going to step aside so I can be there for him.” She smiled. “You give him the child. I get the man.”
I looked at her.
At this woman I had lived alongside for eight years. This woman who had never once looked at me without calculating what I could do for her or what threat I represented. Who had spent the night of the gala engineering a situation she hadn’t fully controlled. Who was now standing in my kitchen telling me how my pregnancy was going to be handled.
Something hardened in my chest.
Cold. Clear. Absolute.
“No,” I said.
Stella blinked. “Excuse me?”
“No,” I said again. “I’m not stepping aside. I’m not handing anyone anything. This is my child and I will decide every single thing about how this goes.” I held her gaze. “You had someone drug me, Stella. At your event, with your invitation, wearing the dress you put on my bed. Whatever you were trying to do that night — it didn’t go the way you planned. And now you want to use the consequences to benefit yourself.” I shook my head. “No.”
Stella stared at me.
For a moment — just a moment — something genuine moved in her expression. Surprise, maybe. Or the specific shock of someone who has never been told no by the person they have always been able to push around.
It lasted less than three seconds.
Then the coldness came back. Deeper than before.
“You have until tomorrow morning to reconsider,” she said quietly. “Because if you don’t — I am going to call Dante Romano personally. I’m going to tell him that you’ve known for weeks that you’re pregnant with his child and you were planning to disappear without telling him.” She let the implication settle. “How do you think a man like Dante Romano responds to that, Mia? How do you think the heir to the most powerful crime family in Miami responds to a woman trying to take his child?”
She picked up her phone. Walked to the kitchen doorway. Stopped.
“Tomorrow morning,” she said. “Think carefully.”
She left.
I stood in the kitchen with my hand on my stomach and felt the specific cold weight of a situation that had just become considerably more dangerous.
She was right about one thing.
A man like Dante Romano — powerful, controlling, accustomed to having everything on his terms — finding out someone was pregnant with his child and keeping it from him?
The consequences of that were not something I wanted to discover.
I had until tomorrow morning.
I spent the night sitting on my bed with the ultrasound photograph and thinking about dark eyes and aspirin on a nightstand and the specific careful way a man had held me in the dark like I was something that mattered.
I made my decision before dawn.
I was going to find Dante Romano.
On my terms. My timeline. My way.
No one else was going to control this story.
I picked up my phone and found the unknown number Marco had called from.
I typed a text: Tell Mr. Romano I’ll meet him tomorrow. Nine AM. He can choose the location.
The response came back in four minutes.
He’ll come to you.
I stared at the message.
He’ll come to you.
I put the phone down and looked at the ultrasound photograph.
“It’s going to be alright,” I said softly.
I was not entirely sure that was true.
But I was going to make it true.
Whatever it took.
- Writer
