Claimed By My Baby's Father

Chapter 2: One Hour

Danny's apartment was loud in the way parties always were when Elena hadn't been to one in years - too many voices stacked on top of each other, music thumping through the floor, the air thick with perfume and spilled beer. She stood just inside the doorway for a second too long, feeling like she'd wandered onto the wrong set of someone else's life.

Then Maya spotted her and shrieked.

"You *came*." Maya pulled her into a hug, already laughing. "I didn't actually think you would. Okay -come on, one drink, that's the deal, and then you can go be responsible again."

"One drink," Elena agreed, smiling despite herself.

For the first twenty minutes it was almost easy. Maya kept the conversation moving so Elena didn't have to think too hard about the last time she'd stood in a room full of people her own age, laughing about nothing that mattered. Someone put a plastic cup in her hand - sweet, fruity, faintly bitter underneath- and she sipped it slowly while Maya introduced her to people whose names she promptly forgot.

She noticed the room start to soften around the edges before she understood what that meant.

It came on strange. Not the pleasant blur of one drink, but something heavier, something that made the music seem to arrive a half-second late, made the lights smear when she turned her head. She set her cup down, unfinished, and reached for the back of a chair to steady herself.

"Maya?" Her voice sounded far away even to her own ears.

Maya was gone - pulled into some other conversation across the room, laughing at something, and Elena couldn't make her legs cooperate enough to cross the distance and find her. The room tilted. A stranger's hand closed around her elbow, steadying her, and she turned her head to thank whoever it was, but the face above her had already gone soft and unfocused, dissolving into shapes and color.

*Something's wrong.*

The thought arrived slow and heavy, wading through fog. She tried to hold onto it - *something's wrong, I need to find Maya, I need to get out* - but the fog only thickened, pulling her under before she could finish the sentence.

After that, there was nothing. No party, no music, no faces. Just a long, dreamless dark.

---

She woke to a ceiling she didn't recognize.

For a full minute, Elena simply lay there, trying to make sense of the unfamiliar room - soft light, expensive linens, a silence so complete it felt wrong after the chaos of the party. Her head throbbed with a dull, chemical ache, and her mouth was dry as paper. When she tried to sit up, the room tilted sideways and she had to grip the edge of the mattress and wait for it to steady.

*Where am I.*

She was still dressed- that registered first, a small mercy her frightened mind grabbed onto -though her shoes were gone and her hair had come loose from its clip. She had no memory of leaving the party. No memory of a car, a hallway, a door. There was a gap in her evening as clean and total as a blade cut, hours simply missing, and on the other side of that gap was this room, this bed, this silence.

Her hands were shaking by the time she found her phone, dead, in her bag on the floor. Her shoes were beside it. There was no note. No name. No indication of whose home this was, only the vague impression - from the size of the windows, the quality of the light, the hush that seemed to cost money -that whoever lived here was wealthy enough not to need to explain themselves to anyone.

She let herself out through a service entrance because it was the only door she could find unlocked, down a back stairwell, into a gray dawn that told her she'd lost most of a night. She didn't see another person the entire way out. No face to put to the last several hours of her life. Nothing but the throb behind her eyes and a low, sick unease she couldn't name -the sense that something had happened to her that she would never fully know.

Maya called eleven times before Elena finally answered, sitting on a park bench two blocks from the building, still trying to convince her hands to stop shaking.

"Oh my God, where *were* you?" Maya's voice cracked with relief and fury in equal measure. "You just vanished. I looked everywhere. I thought-" She stopped herself. "Are you okay? Elena, are you *okay*?"

"I don't know," Elena said honestly, because it was the only honest thing she had left. "I don't remember leaving."

The silence on the other end of the line told her Maya understood exactly what that meant, and was too afraid to say it out loud.

"I'm calling you a cab," Maya said instead, quiet now. "Go home. Lock your door. I'll come by after my shift."

Elena nodded, though there was no one there to see it, and hung up, and sat alone on the bench with the gray morning settling around her shoulders like something she'd have to carry from now on. She told herself it was nothing. She told herself she'd simply had too much to drink, that the missing hours were an accident of a body unused to alcohol, that she would go home and shower and this feeling- this crawling, wordless dread-would fade by tomorrow.

She almost believed it.

It would be seven weeks before she understood how wrong she was.