Not Born To Inherit

The Secret She Can’t Keep

Chapter Five

Zuri did not answer his calls for two days.

She told herself it was because she needed time to think, to figure out how to say the words I am pregnant to a man who had just been overheard refusing an engagement his own family arranged for him. But the truth was simpler and uglier than that. She was scared. Not of him exactly. Of what came after — the headlines, the lawyers, the version of her life that would never again belong only to her.

By the third day, he showed up at her studio in person.

“You are avoiding me,” Roman said, standing in her doorway, hands in his pockets, none of his usual ease in his shoulders.

“I have been busy.”

“You have not answered a single text in three days. That is not busy, that is avoiding.”

She set down the drawing she was not actually working on. “Fine. I am avoiding you.”

“Why?”

She almost told him. She had rehearsed it twice in the mirror that morning — Roman, I need to tell you something — and both times she had lost her nerve before finishing the sentence. Now, standing across from him with the words right there, she thought about the phone call on the site. I never agreed to it. But he had not said no to the idea entirely. He had said no to how it caught him off guard. That was not the same thing.

“It is complicated,” she said instead.

“Try me.”

“Roman, I overheard you on the phone. The engagement.”

His jaw set. “That is not what you think.”

“I do not know what to think. You have never mentioned it. Not once, in six weeks of us being—” she gestured vaguely between them, unable to find a word that fit “—whatever this is.”

“Because it is not real. It is Julian’s idea, not mine. Something Sienna cooked up to stabilize the board before the shareholder vote next quarter. I have told them both no. Repeatedly.”

“It did not sound like a firm no on the phone.”

“Because Julian does not take no for an answer easily, and I was trying not to blow up at him in the middle of a hallway.” Roman ran a hand through his hair, frustration bleeding into his voice for the first time since she had known him. “Zuri, I am not marrying anyone my family picks out for me. That is not — that has never been on the table for me. Not since you.”

Not since you.

The words landed somewhere soft and unguarded in her chest, and for one second she almost told him everything. The pregnancy. The two lines on the stick. The math that connected one reckless night to the rest of both their lives.

Then his phone rang, an assistant’s name on the screen, and his whole posture changed — shoulders straightening, jaw setting, already halfway back into the version of himself the world expected him to be.

“I have to take this. It is the board.” He looked at her, something apologetic in his face. “Can we finish this tonight? Dinner. Just us.”

“Sure,” she said, because it was easier than saying anything else.

He left. The moment closed. The words she needed to say stayed exactly where they had been for a week now — stuck, heavy, unsaid.

Dinner did not happen.

Julian called an emergency family meeting instead — the shareholder vote had moved up, the board was restless, and Sienna had clearly decided the engagement announcement could not wait another quarter. Roman texted Zuri an apology at eight that night, promising to reschedule, and Zuri sat alone in her apartment reading it three times before setting the phone face-down on the counter.

She caught the local news out of habit while she reheated leftovers she was not hungry for.

And there it was. A photo of Roman on the steps of the Brooks Holdings building, a woman in a pale blue dress on his arm — someone Zuri did not recognize, poised and polished in a way that made her feel instantly, painfully underdressed by comparison even sitting alone in her kitchen. The chyron across the bottom read: Brooks heir spotted with rumored fiancée at family gala.

Zuri turned it off before the segment finished.

She told herself there was probably an explanation. She told herself Roman had looked her in the eye that morning and said not since you, and that had to count for something. But the photo sat in her mind anyway, next to the memory of his voice on the phone, next to every headline she had ever read about men like him and the promises they made to women who were never meant to last past one good night.

She thought about the appointment card sitting in her desk drawer. The one for the clinic. The one she had not told a single person about.

She thought about how easy it would be to just — not say anything. Let him have his family, his board, his complicated, glossy life. Let the baby be hers alone, not complicated by lawyers and headlines and a man whose world clearly had room for someone else on his arm when it mattered.

It was not fair. She knew that, even as she thought it. But fair was not the word occupying her chest right now. Fear was.

Roman called at eleven that night.

She let it ring twice before answering.

“I am sorry about dinner,” he said, no preamble, sounding tired in a way she had not heard before. “Today was a mess. The photo you probably saw — that was staged by Sienna’s team, not me. I did not even know she would be there until I walked in.”

“It is fine.”

“It is not fine. You sound strange.”

“I am tired, Roman. It has been a long week.” The same excuse she had used at the site walk, exhausted now, barely holding.

A pause on his end. “Zuri. Is something going on?”

She stood in her kitchen, phone pressed to her ear, one hand resting flat against her stomach without meaning to, and felt the words rise up one more time — I am pregnant, and I am scared, and I do not know what any of this means for either of us.

“No,” she said. “Nothing is going on.”

She hung up before he could hear whatever was cracking underneath her voice, and sat alone in the dark of her kitchen, carrying a secret that was only getting harder to keep with every day she let pass.

Two floors below her building, a car she had not noticed was still waiting at the curb.

Inside it, someone was watching her building, phone raised, snapping a photo of her lit kitchen window — someone who worked for Sienna, and who had just been given a very simple, very specific assignment: find out who the Brooks heir had really been spending his nights with.