Everyone Wants Me Now, Especially the Father of My Secret Son

“You're burning it. You're actually burning the damn thing right now.”

Elena leaned against the kitchen counter, arms folded tightly across her chest, trying so hard not to laugh that her shoulders were already shaking.

Smoke curled from the pot on the stove and Adrian stood over it with a wooden spoon in his hand like a man trying to defuse a bomb, completely unaware that whatever was happening inside that pot had already gone beyond saving.

He was twenty-four years old, his tie thrown carelessly over a chair, his sleeves pushed up to his elbows. And he obviously had no idea what he was doing.

He turned toward her with an offended look, the spoon dripping sauce onto the floor.

“It's not burning. It's glazing.”

“Pasta doesn't glaze, Adrian.”

“This pasta does.”

The confidence in his voice broke whatever little control Elena had left inside her.

She burst out laughing before she could stop it. She had to sit down because her legs felt weak from holding in the laughter for so long.

Adrian just stood there and smiled. Not because he'd won whatever ridiculous argument they were having. But because she was laughing.

He looked at her like her laughter was the whole point of the evening. And if he was honest with himself, it probably was.

Elena pressed a hand over her mouth, trying to calm herself.

“You're impossible.”

“And you're ungrateful.”

Elena laughed even harder. The smoke alarm went off two minutes later and they gave up. There would be no dinner that night, at least not the kind Adrian had planned.

So they ended up eating cereal instead, sitting cross-legged on Adrian's living-room floor with their bowls balanced between them and neither of them minded.

Outside, the city kept moving. Car horns sounded somewhere below. A distant siren rose and faded. Someone was playing music loudly from an open window.

The whole city was awake. But inside Adrian's apartment, it felt like the rest of the world had disappeared. It was just the two of them.

With Adrian beside her, Elena felt something settle quietly inside her. Something safe.

She looked at him eating the cereal as if it had been his plan all along and smiled to herself, thinking that she had never felt this safe with anyone. Maybe she had finally found somewhere she could stay.

Later, Elena walked toward the window and noticed something sitting on the sill.

A smooth gray stone, small enough to fit in her palm.

She picked it up and turned it over twice. It was nothing special. Just a little gray stone.

But she looked at it for a moment before turning toward Adrian.

She walked over and pressed it into his hand, then closed his fingers around it herself.

“For good luck,” she said.

Adrian looked down at his closed hand, then back at her.

“I don't need luck. I have you.”

Her heart stumbled. Just once. But hard enough that she felt it. Elena tried to hide what those words did to her. But she failed, so she looked down at their hands instead.

“You're going to need it anyway. Keep it in your pocket. Whenever you have an important meeting or a hard day, touch it and think of me.”

Adrian rolled his eyes, but he collected it and put it in his desk drawer at work the very next morning, and he never once thought of throwing it away.

Elena came to Adrian's office early to surprise him with coffee. She was still smiling when she reached the hallway and already imagining the look on his face when he saw her.

Just as she was about to walk in, she heard Adrian's father's voice, sharp and clipped through the half-open door, cutting through the hallway like a blade.

Her smile disappeared. Richard Kane never needed to raise his voice. He didn't need to. Every word he spoke was precise and cold, and somehow that made it worse.

Elena slowed her steps without meaning to, something in her instincts told her not to walk into whatever was happening inside.

She should turn around and give Adrian his privacy But she stopped and caught pieces of the conversation. A name she didn't recognize. Something about a merger and a suitable match.

Her fingers tightened around the coffee cup. Then Adrian spoke.

“Dad, I'm not doing this right now.” His voice was tight and defensive.

"You'll do it because I told you to. This thing you are having with that girl in the marketing department, is not serious, is it?"

Elena stopped breathing. The coffee cup suddenly felt too hot against her palm.

That girl.

She knew they were talking about her and she should have walked away right then. But she didn't.

"Don't take it seriously," Adrian said finally, his voice sharp and fast. "What we had was nothing more than a game."

Elena gasped at that moment and the coffee cup slipped out of her grip.

The sound of the cup falling down cracked through the hallway and interrupted the conversation.

Adrian turned. His eyes found hers, and for one second, something in his face broke open.

Panic.

And something worse than panic, something that looked almost like relief. As if some part of him was relieved she had finally heard the truth without forcing him to say it to her face.

Richard stood between them, perfectly composed. He looked like a man who had just won a negotiation he hadn't expected to need to fight for.

“Elena—”

Adrian called her name, but nothing came after it. No explanation. Just her name hanging there, and his mouth opening and closing with no words coming out because his father was still in the room and his pride wouldn't let him fall apart in front of her.

Elena stared at him, waiting. Just for a second maybe he would explain.

But he didn't.

Grabbing his chance, Richard moved first, he walked to the door and stood in front of Elena. He looked down at Elena like she was nothing more than an inconvenience standing between him and his son's future.

“You heard that? So don't go embarrassing yourself,” he said, his voice low and mean.

Hearing this, something in Elena went still and clear. A strange, painful clarity that seemed to arrive only because the worst thing she had feared had finally happened.

But instead of stepping back the way he expected, she stepped closer.

“Embarrassing myself?” A short, humorless laugh escaped her.

Richard's expression shifted, it clearly wasn't the reaction Richard was hoping for, because something flashed behind his eyes.

“You're the one who should be ashamed and difficult! How can you be so insecure about your own company and business, that a father and son have to team up to be on guard against an ordinary girl working in the marketing department?”

Richard’s jaw tightened so hard the muscles in his cheek twitch.

“How dare you talk to me like that?” he said, his voice sharp and cold, stripping the air right out of the room.

But Elena barely felt it. She had already been hurt and there was nothing left for him to take.

She stepped closer again, close enough that their feet were almost touching.

“Because I care about your son,” she said, her voice was calm but there was grief underneath it, deep and cutting, but she refused to let it shake her.

“And it breaks my heart to see what you've turned him into just to feed your own insecurity.”

Then her eyes moved to Adrian. He was still standing there.

“And he himself actually enjoys being your puppet, because he's too afraid to stand his ground against you.”

Adrian flinched. She saw it and somehow that hurt more.

Elena turned fully toward him. “And as for you, keep hiding behind your pathetic father and continue to be his puppet.”

Her throat burned but she swallowed it down. “But don't you dare forget how exactly you sound in this room today.”

Her voice finally cracked around the edges. “I hope it's the first thing you think of every single time you look in a mirror, trying to convince yourself you're a good man.”

The room went silent. Elena couldn't stay another second, she turned around and began to walk away.

“Elena, wait.”

Adrian's voice came behind her. For one moment, her body wanted to obey. To stop and let him explain but her heart had already heard enough.

She kept walking, her spine straight, chin up. She didn't let herself cry until she was three floors down in an empty stairwell with her back against the cold concrete wall.

Then her strength disappeared and her breath caught. She covered her mouth as the cry came out anyway.

She squeezed her eyes shut, but it didn't stop the tears. They came hot and fast, slipping down her cheeks as she tried desperately to breathe around the pain crushing her chest.

Had any of it been real? Had she imagined every soft look? Every late-night conversation? Every time he reached for her hand without thinking?

Had she been the only one who thought they were building something?

Elena slid down the wall until she was sitting on the cold floor. She pressed both hands against her face. She wanted to hate him.

It would have been easier if she could hate him. But even now, with her heart breaking apart inside her, some stupid part of her still wanted Adrian to come through that door and kneel beside her.

She wanted him to tell her she had misunderstood and tell her that the words hadn't meant what they sounded like.

But Adrian didn't follow her. He remained in his office, frozen, staring at his father while Richard's chest heaved with silent volcanic rage.

He told himself she would call him that night and he would explain, and everything would go back to normal

But Elena didn't call that night. In fact she didn't call the next day either or the day after that. She had even blocked his number and every means to get to her.

She disappeared and Adrian had no idea where she had gone.

But three weeks later, Elena stood in a pharmacy bathroom two states away. She was alone.

The fluorescent light above her made everything look too bright, too harsh.

Her hands were shaking. She stared down at the small plastic stick in her palm.

For some seconds, she couldn't understand what she was seeing.

Two pink lines.

Elena blinked but the lines didn't disappear. Her heart began to pound.

“No.”

The word barely came out of her mouth. She looked again and her hand moved instinctively to her stomach.

Adrian's baby.

Her eyes were immediately filled with tears, suddenly the heartbreak she'd been trying to survive became something else entirely.

Something terrifying that would change everything.

She had lost Adrian. Now she was carrying a piece of him she could never simply walk away from.