In His Bed

Chapter 6: Telling Him

ARIA

My plan for the morning was simple. Call Stan. Ask him to meet somewhere neutral. Say the words out loud in a controlled setting, on my terms, with an exit route mapped out in advance.

The plan fell apart at 8:14 a.m., when Anna called about something else entirely, a work thing, a scheduling thing, nothing that mattered, and I opened my mouth to answer a routine question about my week and instead heard myself say, "I might be pregnant," in a voice that didn't sound like my own.

There was a long silence on the other end of the line.

"Might be," Anna repeated carefully, "or are?"

"Are." I closed my eyes. "Two tests. Both positive."

"Okay." Anna's voice had gone very calm, very deliberate, the tone she used when she needed me to know she wasn't going to fall apart even if I did. "Okay. Whose."

"Don't."

"I have to ask, Aria, I love you, but I have to ask."

"You know whose."

Another silence, shorter this time, weighted with everything Anna wasn't saying. "The gala," she said finally. "Stan."

"The gala. Stan." I pressed my palm flat against my own sternum, like I could hold something in place by force. "I haven't told him yet."

"Are you going to?"

"Today." The word cost me something to say. "I have to. It's, it's not just mine to decide what happens next."

"Do you want me to come with you?"

The offer was so immediate, so uncomplicated, that I felt my throat tighten in a way that had nothing to do with Stan at all. "No," I said. "I need to do this alone."

"You don't need to do everything alone, you know. That's not actually a rule."

"It's worked so far."

"Has it?" Anna's voice was gentle, but the question landed anyway, precise as a blade. "Or has it just meant nobody's watched you carry it?"

I didn't have an answer for that. I let the silence sit until Anna, mercifully, let it go.

I almost didn't make it out of my apartment.

I got as far as my hand on the doorknob before the second thoughts arrived in full force, not about whether to tell him, that part felt non negotiable, but about how, and when, and whether there was some version of this conversation that didn't end with me handing Stan Montenegro permanent, irreversible leverage over the rest of my life. He was already the person who knew me best in the world, or had been once, which made him uniquely positioned to hurt me worse than anyone else ever could. And now he'd know this too.

You're not doing this for him, I reminded myself, hand still on the door. You're doing this because it's the right thing, and because he deserves to know, and because you refuse to be the kind of person who keeps something like this from someone out of spite.

I made myself walk out the door before the argument could talk me out of it again.

Montenegro Holdings occupied the top eleven floors of a glass tower downtown, and I stood across the street from it for eleven full minutes before I could make myself cross.

I'd rehearsed the words a dozen different ways on the walk over, none of which survived contact with the actual building. I'm pregnant felt too blunt. We need to talk felt like a cliché from a movie I'd have mocked a week ago. There's something you should know felt like I was delivering a diagnosis instead of the truth about a child that was, whether either of us had chosen it or not, half his.

The lobby doors were glass, tinted just enough that I could see my own reflection in them before I could see through them, a woman in a gray coat, composed on the outside, visibly not composed if you knew where to look. I recognized the stillness in my own reflection. It was the stillness of someone holding a breath she refused to let anyone see her need to take.

My phone buzzed. A calendar reminder for a client call in forty minutes. Ordinary life, still happening, indifferent to the fact that mine had already changed shape.

I looked up at the building, eleven floors of glass, Stan somewhere near the top of it, probably in a meeting, probably running his empire with the same controlled competence he brought to everything, completely unaware that in the next few minutes his entire life was about to fracture into a before and after, the same way mine already had.

My hand found the door handle.

I didn't pull it.

I stood there instead, in front of Montenegro Holdings, in a gray coat, on an ordinary Tuesday morning, with two pieces of plastic in a drawer at home that had already decided the next eighteen years of both our lives, and found that for the first time since I was fifteen years old, I was too afraid to walk through a door.

My phone buzzed again. Not the calendar this time.

Stan M.

I stared at his name on the screen, heart going unreasonably fast for a text message, and read the words that had apparently been sitting unsent in his phone since Sunday, finally, for whatever reason, sent now:

I know something's wrong. You don't have to tell me what. Just tell me you're okay.

I stood outside his building, phone in one hand, the other still resting on a door I couldn't make myself open, and felt the whole careful architecture of my plan collapse under the weight of one uncomplicated, unwanted, entirely inconvenient truth.

He still knew me well enough to notice from a distance that something was wrong.

I was going to have to go in.