In His Bed

Chapter 17: His Father's Voice

Aria

We decided on a joint statement two days later, careful and controlled, released through Stan's communications team on our own timeline instead of the board's. It confirmed the relationship, confirmed the pregnancy, and asked, with as much dignity as a press release could manage, for privacy during what it called "a personal and joyful time."

It was, Stan assured me, as close to controlling the narrative as either of us was going to get.

It didn't stop his father from calling.

I wasn't there when it happened. Stan told me about it afterward, voice carefully flat in the specific way it went when he was working hard to keep something from cracking through.

Stan

My father's voice hadn't changed in twelve years. Still the same measured, unhurried cadence, the same way of making every sentence sound like a verdict already reached before the conversation began.

"I read the statement," he said, no greeting, no preamble. "You could have called me before it went out. I am, technically, still your father."

"I didn't think you'd care to hear it from me first."

"That's unfair, Stan."

"Is it?" I kept my voice level, the way I'd trained myself to for twelve years in rooms exactly like this one, except this time the training felt thinner than usual, worn down by three sleepless nights and a woman I loved sitting twenty feet away in my own living room. "You've called my office twice in the last month. Not me. My office. If you wanted to talk to your son, you had my number the whole time."

A pause, longer than I expected, and for a moment I almost thought I'd landed something real.

"The board is concerned," he said instead, retreating to safer ground. "A public scandal, right in the middle of the Whitfield acquisition, is not the kind of instability this company can afford right now."

"It's not a scandal. It's my life."

"Your life has always had a way of becoming the company's business the moment you make it public, Stan. That's the cost of the name you carry. I'd have thought you understood that by now."

Something old and familiar tightened in my chest, the specific ache of being reduced, once again, to a liability instead of a person. "I understand it fine. I just refuse to let it dictate how I live."

"That's a luxury, not a principle."

"Maybe." I closed my eyes, steadying myself before I said the next part, the part I'd been rehearsing since long before this call ever happened. "I'm not calling you for approval. I'm calling to tell you I'm having a child, and that I'd like you to be part of that, if you're capable of being part of something without trying to control it first. That's the actual reason for this conversation. Everything else is just noise."

The silence that followed was longer than any silence I remembered from my entire childhood.

"I don't know how to do that," my father said finally, and something in his voice cracked, just slightly, in a way I'd genuinely never heard before. "I never learned how. Your mother used to say that too, near the end."

It wasn't an apology. It wasn't even close to one. But it was, for the first time in longer than I could remember, something honest, and I found myself sitting with it, unsure what to do with an honesty I'd stopped expecting from him years ago.

"Then maybe start learning," I said quietly. "It's not too late. Not completely."

"I'll think about it."

It wasn't a yes. But it wasn't the flat refusal I'd braced for either, and for reasons I couldn't fully articulate, I let myself hold onto that small, uncertain opening as something worth keeping.

Aria

He found me in the kitchen afterward, quiet in a way that told me the call had cost him more than he was willing to say outright.

"How bad," I asked.

"Not as bad as it could have been." He sat down across from me, rubbing a hand over his face. "He said he'd think about being part of it. That's more than I expected, honestly."

"That's something."

"It's something," he agreed, though his voice carried more caution than hope. "I've learned not to expect too much from him. Every time I do, I end up disappointed in a way that takes longer to recover from than the disappointment should warrant."

I reached across the table and took his hand, the same gesture he'd offered me so many times over the last few weeks, and watched something in his shoulders ease slightly at the small, steadying contact.

"For what it's worth," I said quietly, "you already know how to do the thing he never learned. You showed up. You keep showing up. That's not nothing, Stan. That's the whole difference between you and him."

He looked at me for a long moment, something raw and grateful moving behind his eyes, and didn't say anything at all, just held onto my hand a little tighter, like the words themselves were something he needed to feel instead of hear.