In His Bed

Chapter 16: Aftershock

Aria

My phone didn't stop buzzing after midnight.

By six the next morning I had forty three unread notifications, group texts from law school friends I hadn't spoken to in a year, a voicemail from my mother that started calm and ended somewhere near panic, and a single text from Anna that just said call me the second you're awake, I mean it.

I called Stan first.

"Have you seen the board's group email," he said, before I'd even gotten out a greeting, voice already stretched thin with exhaustion. "They want an emergency call. This morning. All of them."

"What are you going to tell them?"

"The truth, mostly. Enough of it." A pause, heavy with things he wasn't saying yet. "I'm not going to lie about the baby, Aria. Not to them, not to anyone. I told you that from the start."

"I know. I'm not asking you to."

"I know you're not." Something in his voice softened, just slightly, under the strain. "I just needed to say it out loud again. Remind myself."

The board call happened at nine, and Stan asked me to be there, not in the room but on standby, in case questions came his way that only I could answer. I sat in my apartment with my laptop open to nothing in particular, phone in hand, and waited, the way you wait outside an operating room for news you can't control.

He called at eleven, voice flat with the particular exhaustion of a man who'd just spent two hours defending his own life to people who felt entitled to an opinion on it.

"How bad," I asked.

"Mixed." He exhaled, long and slow. "Half of them don't care, as long as it doesn't tank the Whitfield deal. The other half are worried about optics, about the company's image, about whether a scandal like this makes us look unstable right when we need to look rock solid." A pause. "My father's old seat is still on that board, Aria. Filled by someone he installed himself. That's the half causing the most noise."

"Are they going to push for anything?"

"They want us to get ahead of the story. Officially confirm the relationship, control the narrative before someone else writes it for us." Something tightened in his voice. "Which means going public. Really public. Not a photo circulating, an actual statement."

I sat with that for a long moment, the weight of it settling somewhere low in my chest. "That feels fast."

"It is fast. I told them I needed to talk to you before agreeing to anything." A beat. "This is your life too, Aria. I'm not going to let a boardroom decide how the world finds out about our baby."

Something in me eased slightly at that, the specific relief of being asked instead of managed, and I found myself, despite the chaos of the morning, grateful for exactly the kind of consideration Stan's father had apparently never once extended to anyone.

"I need to think," I admitted. "Not about whether. About how. On my terms, not the board's."

"Take whatever time you need. I'll hold them off."

Anna showed up at my door an hour later with coffee and a look on her face that told me she'd already read everything the internet had to offer on the subject.

"Okay," she said, settling onto my couch like she owned it, the way she'd done since college. "Tell me what's actually true, because half of what I read this morning sounds like fan fiction."

"Which half."

"The half where you two apparently had a secret romance the whole time you were pretending to hate each other at that gala fundraiser two years ago."

"That's not true. We hadn't spoken in twelve years before the gala."

"Okay, good, that's what I figured, but I had to ask." Anna studied me for a long moment, her usual bluntness softening into something gentler. "How are you actually doing? Not the version you'd give your mother. The real one."

I felt something in my chest loosen at the question, the same way it had with Stan the night before, the specific relief of being asked plainly instead of managed. "Overwhelmed," I admitted. "Scared. And underneath all of it, something I don't fully want to look at yet, because looking at it feels dangerous."

"Which is?"

"Hope," I said quietly. "That maybe this actually works. That maybe he's not going to be the person I spent twelve years bracing for him to become again."

Anna reached over and squeezed my hand, no judgment in it at all, just steady, familiar support. "For what it's worth, from everything you've told me, he sounds like he's trying. Actually trying, not performing it."

"He is."

"Then maybe let yourself hope a little. You've earned that, Aria. You don't have to armor against everything forever."

I didn't have an answer for that, not yet, but I let the words sit there anyway, unfamiliar and warm, the first real permission I'd given myself in longer than I could remember to want something without immediately bracing for the loss of it.