WHERE THE RIVALRY ENDS

The Blowout

Two blue lines.

I squeezed my eyes shut, tried to call up the man from the hotel, the ghost I pretended was real for a few hours. His face slipped away, fuzzy around the edges, but his cologne lingered on my skin, sweet and stubborn, proof that for one night, a stranger’s voice made me believe I could be more than one long disaster. He said I could be more. I almost believed it.

“Veda? Where are you?”

My dad. Arthur. His voice crashed through the memory, rough, heavy with all the things he never says. I could hear his footsteps in the hallway: that slow, tired shuffle men get when life’s gathering more losses than wins.

“I’m fine, Dad,” I called back, struggling to sound normal. The words came out thin and shaky. “Just… just a headache.”

“Open the door. I found the ledger from 2011. I need you to look at these projections again. If I can show the bank the margins dropped because of the Colt acquisition…”

“Dad, stop!” I shot up, heart pounding so hard my vision popped with white spots. “The bank doesn’t care about 2011! It’s 2026! We’re losing the house in three weeks!”

Silence. Not angry, just empty. Like stepping off a ledge and waiting for the ground. The hush of a man who can’t admit that time bulldozed his life and left nothing standing. The doorknob rattled, metal scraping metal.

“Veda, open this door.”

Panic made my hands useless. I tried to hide the test, jam it under a pile of towels. It slipped, skittered across the tiles, and landed right at the c***k beneath the door. Before I could grab it, it slid out, right into the hall, my own traitor hands giving me away.

I froze. Couldn’t breathe.

A shadow fell across the floor. Arthur bent down, picked up the plastic stick. He stared at it like it might explain everything broken in his life. For a second, nothing moved, not the air, not the old buzzing light, not even the house. We all held our breath.

Then he exploded. He kicked the door, hinges shrieking, and filled the doorway, blotting out everything but his disappointment. One hand gripped the test, two blue lines, no way around it. The other clutched that battered “Aegis Project” folder, the thing we’d bled for, the weight that crushed us year after year.

“Who?” His voice barely made it out, face pale, eyes wild and bright with some new horror. “Who did this to you?”

“Dad, please, it was just one night…”

“One night?” He moved closer, and the room shrank. His anger and fear pressed in, thick as fog. He shoved the test at me. “One night of what, Veda? Throwing away everything we have left? Selling off your dignity, the last thing Levi Colt hasn’t tried to slap a price tag on!”

“This isn’t about the Colts!” The words ripped out of me, raw and sharp. I couldn’t stop, the tears came, hot and sudden, blurring everything up. “This is my life! I’m twenty-one, and every minute I’ve spent grieving for a company that died before I even knew what it was! I just wanted one night where I could breathe, where I didn’t feel like I was choking in this mausoleum you call home!”

His jaw locked. Knuckles white on the “Aegis” folder. The veins in his neck stood out. “You think this is about you? You’re a Rossman. Everything you do lands on me. I’m fighting to get back what we lost, and now? Now you’re just another number. Some girl who couldn’t keep her legs shut while her father tried to save her from herself!”

His hand flew. A slap, sharp and hot. My cheek burned, but the words cut deeper. The look on his face, disgust, and something worse. He stared at his own hand, like it didn’t belong to him, like he’d just crossed a line he’d never come back from.

We stared at each other. The silence felt huge, crushing. There was so much we didn’t say, piled up between us, impossible to get past.

Arthur’s voice cracked at last, low and shaking with rage and maybe fear. “I’m going to find him, Veda. I don’t care who he is. He’s going to pay for this. He’ll sign whatever I put in front of him, or I’ll burn him down along with the rest of us.”

He turned away, hugging the folder to his chest like armor, his legacy, his shame, his excuse for everything lost and everything I never got to be. And I stood there.

“You don’t even know his name!” I choked out, my cheek still burning. “I don’t even know his name!”

Arthur just glared at me, then hurled the pregnancy test into the sink. It hit the porcelain with a sharp, empty sound. “Then remember fast,” he snapped. “By tomorrow, that child is getting a father. And I’ll finally have something to pull us out of this dump.”

He stormed off, the door creaking behind him, barely hanging onto its hinges. I just slid down to the floor. The tiles were cold, biting through my clothes, but I barely noticed. My eyes went right to the test in the sink.

Two blue lines. They stared at me, almost like they were laughing. My hand shook as I reached for it. I didn’t see a baby. Not even a mistake. All I saw was what my father saw: something to use.

I couldn’t stop thinking about that night, the sandalwood scent, the way he’d whispered, “You’re so beautiful, Veda,” just before he led me to the bed. And suddenly, it hit me,  heavy and cold. The man I’d given everything to wasn’t just some random guy.

He was everything now. And if my father ever found him, the war between the Rossman’s and the rest of the world would get a lot uglier.