His Secret Baby

Two Lines

Three weeks after the Regency, Aria threw up twice before her morning shift and blamed it on the cheap eggs from the corner store.

By the second week, she stopped blaming the eggs.

She sat on the edge of the bathtub in the tiny apartment she shared with Nadia, staring at a pregnancy test she'd bought with money she didn't have, watching two pink lines settle into place like a verdict she couldn't appeal.

"Aria?" Nadia's voice came through the door, careful, the way you talk to someone standing near a ledge. "You've been in there twenty minutes."

Aria opened the door with the test still in her hand, because she didn't trust her own voice yet, and Nadia looked at it, looked at her, and didn't say anything for a long moment. That was the thing about Nadia — she knew when silence was kinder than a reaction.

"Okay," Nadia finally said, sitting down beside her on the edge of the tub. "Okay. We're going to figure this out."

"There's nothing to figure out." Aria's voice came out steadier than she expected, which surprised her more than the two lines had. "I'm keeping it."

"I didn't ask if you were keeping it. I asked what we're going to do." Nadia bumped her shoulder gently. "Different question."

Aria almost laughed, the kind of laugh that was one wrong word away from crying instead. She thought of her mother in a hospital bed three miles away, needing more money than Aria had ever had at once in her life. She thought of the man in the elevator, the man who'd looked at her the next morning like she was something he needed to scrape off his shoe. She thought about how impossible it would sound, walking into Knight Enterprises and telling the receptionist she needed five minutes with the CEO because she was carrying his child — and how he would look at her when she said it, that same cold, closed-off face from the hotel room, already halfway to an accusation before she'd even finished the sentence.

"I'm not telling him," Aria said.

"Aria—"

"He called me a liar to my face, Nadia. He threw money at me like I was something he'd bought at a discount. If I show up now, pregnant, five weeks after he humiliated me in front of no one but himself, what do you think he's going to believe? That I fell in love with him in one elevator ride? That I've been carrying his baby out of some grand romantic gesture?" She shook her head. "He'll think I planned this. He'll think I'm exactly the woman he already decided I was. I'm not walking into that."

Nadia was quiet for a moment, turning the test box over in her hands like it might offer a better argument than the one Aria had already made. "So what, you do this alone?"

"I've done everything alone so far." Aria pressed the heel of her hand against her eyes. "One more thing won't kill me."

She didn't believe that, not really, not in the parts of herself that lay awake some nights doing math that never worked out no matter how many times she ran it. But she said it anyway, because saying it out loud made it feel possible, and possible was the only currency she had left.

The weeks that followed were harder than she let herself admit to anyone but Nadia.

Morning sickness didn't care about double shifts. She threw up in the café bathroom between orders, wiped her mouth, put her apron back on, and went back to work because the alternative was not eating. The hospital called twice about her mother's balance, polite and relentless in the way collections departments always were, using words like "final notice" that made Aria's stomach drop lower than the nausea ever had.

She picked up extra hours anywhere she could get them — an extra shift at the café, weekend catering gigs Nadia found through a friend, even two nights cleaning offices downtown after the building emptied out, mop in one hand and a hand pressed to her stomach with the other, willing herself not to be sick on someone else's carpet.

It wasn't enough. It was never quite enough.

The eviction notice came on a Tuesday, taped to the apartment door in block letters that felt almost cruel in their plainness, like the world had run out of gentler ways to say the same thing it always said to her: not enough, not enough, not enough.

"We'll figure it out," Nadia said again, and this time there was less certainty in it, though she tried to hide the crack.

"I know," Aria said, because it was easier than admitting she didn't.

They moved in with Nadia's cousin two towns over, three of them crammed into a one-bedroom apartment that smelled like someone else's cooking and someone else's life, and Aria told herself it was temporary, the way she'd been telling herself everything was temporary since she was seventeen years old and learned that her mother's kidneys were failing and there was no version of "temporary" that didn't eventually mean "forever" if you didn't fight hard enough against it.

She fought.

She picked up a job at a small bakery on the edge of the neighborhood, sweeping floors and boxing pastries at four in the morning before her other shifts, because the owner — an older woman named Rosa who reminded her painfully of what a grandmother might have felt like — noticed her staring too long at the bread in the display case one morning and asked, simply, "You hungry, or do you want to learn?"

Aria wanted to learn.

She was good at it in a way that surprised her. Her hands understood dough the way they'd never quite understood the math of her bank account — flour and water and yeast responding to patience in a way that bills and hospital notices never had. Rosa started leaving her alone with the ovens earlier than she probably should have. Aria started staying later than her shift required, just to watch bread rise, just to feel like something in her life was growing instead of running out.

She was five months along, flour still dusted across her wrists, when Rosa found her crying quietly into a batch of dough that had failed to rise for the third time that week — not because of the bread, but because her mother's transplant had just been pushed back another six months for lack of funds, and Aria didn't know how many more sixth months her mother had left to give.

Rosa didn't ask what was wrong. She just handed Aria a clean towel and said the thing that would end up changing the rest of her life.

"If you're going to cry over dough," Rosa said, "you might as well own the bakery making it."