While I Carried His Baby, He Chose Her

The elevator climbed forty-two floors, and I climbed with it, one hand pressed flat against the small curve beneath my emerald silk dress.

Five months. Twenty weeks. A hundred and forty-something days of keeping the secret tucked inside me like a folded note.

Tonight, I was going to give it to him.

I rehearsed the words in my head again. *Asher, I have something for you. Something better than a watch or a bottle of scotch.* Then I'd take his hand, place it on my belly, and let him feel what a decade of loving him had built.

The doors slid open onto the penthouse.

Gold light. Crystal glasses catching it and throwing it back. A quartet in the corner playing something soft and expensive. Manhattan stretched black and glittering behind the glass walls, the rain just beginning to streak down in silver lines.

"Claire." A woman I barely knew from Asher's firm kissed the air beside my cheek. "You look stunning. Just... stunning tonight."

Her eyes did something strange. Slid off mine, too fast.

I smiled. "Thank you."

I moved through the room. Ten years of these parties. I knew the choreography. A hand on an elbow here, a compliment there, a laugh at a joke I'd heard before. Faces I recognized from anniversaries and Christmas dinners and long weekends in the Hamptons. Colleagues. Asher's cousins. The senior partner who'd once told me I was "the best thing that ever happened to that boy."

Tonight, none of them held my gaze.

I pressed my thumb against the inside of my left wrist. A small, private pressure. *Something's off.*

But then, everyone at these things was always half-drunk and half-watching for someone more important.

I took a flute of champagne from a passing tray. Didn't drink it. Just held it, cold against my palm, and looked for him.

He was near the piano. Silver suit. That practiced tilt of the head. Laughing at something a blonde girl was saying — a girl I didn't recognize, all bare shoulders and shining hair, twenty-two if she was a day. His hand was on the small of her back.

I told myself it meant nothing.

I told myself a lot of things, in the two seconds before someone tapped a knife against a glass and the room went quiet.

Asher took the microphone from the quartet's leader. He looked out over the crowd, and for one heartbeat, his eyes found mine.

He smiled.

Then he looked away.

"Friends," he said. "Family. Thank you all for being here on such a special night."

My hand drifted to my stomach.

"Two weeks ago," he went on, "I met someone. And she changed everything I thought I knew about myself."

The champagne flute in my hand stopped feeling cold. Stopped feeling like anything.

"For years I told everyone marriage wasn't for me. I told myself that too. Turns out I just hadn't met the right person yet."

Someone in the crowd let out a delighted little gasp. Rehearsed. It sounded rehearsed.

"Jenna," Asher said. "Come up here, baby."

The blonde girl floated forward through a crowd that parted for her like they'd known she was coming.

Because they had. Every single one of them had known.

Asher went down on one knee.

A ring appeared in his fingers — a ring I had never seen, a ring bigger than anything he had ever bought me — and he slid it onto her hand while the room erupted in applause.

I stood in the middle of it, unmoving, my champagne glass still lifted halfway to my mouth. Somewhere very far away, my baby shifted, a small, blind flutter under my ribs.

Ten years.

Ten years of *marriage isn't for me, Claire. You know how I feel about that. Why do you have to keep pushing this?*

Two weeks.

My legs moved before my mind did.

I walked forward. People stepped out of my way — some looking hungry, some looking sorry, all looking. Asher rose to his feet, Jenna beaming beside him, and his face did something complicated when he saw me coming. Not shame. Something more like *anticipation.*

He wanted the scene. He wanted me to be the scene.

I stopped in front of him. Lifted the flute. And threw the champagne straight into his face.

It hit with a wet crack. Gold ran down his forehead, into his lashes, dripped from his jaw onto the silver lapel of his suit.

The applause died.

"Ten years," I said. Quietly. Not a shout. I didn't need to shout. The room was so silent I could hear the rain on the windows. "Ten years you told me you weren't capable of it. That commitment was a cage. That I was asking too much."

Asher opened his mouth.

"Don't." One word. He closed his mouth.

I looked at Jenna. She was still smiling, but it had gone stiff around the edges, like a photograph curling in heat.

"He's not afraid of marriage," I told her, gentle as I could manage. "He's afraid of anyone who knows him long enough to see what's underneath. Give it two years. You'll find out."

I turned back to him.

"You're a small man, Asher. In a very nice suit."

Then I walked out.

I made it to the elevator without running. Made it down forty-two floors without breathing. Made it through the lobby and out the revolving door and into the rain before my knees decided they were done.

I put my back against the wet stone of the building. Pressed both hands to my belly. The rain came down in sheets, plastering my hair to my face, soaking through the emerald silk until it clung to me like a second skin.

*Okay,* I thought. *Okay. Okay. Okay.*

Not crying. Cataloguing. What I had. What I didn't. The apartment was his. The joint account. My notebook was at home, thank God. My father's number. Diana's number. My job.

My baby.

A black car slid to the curb in front of me. The rear door opened.

Levi Reed stepped out into the rain.

He didn't say my name. Didn't ask if I was all right — he could see I wasn't, and he had the decency not to insult me by pretending otherwise. He just held out a dry charcoal jacket, folded once over his arm, and waited.

I looked at him. Rain on his dark hair. That still, patient face I'd known for seven years, the one that had said to me over a coffee three years ago, *You deserve more than what he gives you, Claire,* and then never mentioned it again.

I got in the car.

He closed the door behind me, walked around, slid into the driver's seat himself. No driver. No security. Just him, and the soft click of the locks, and the heater already turned up because he'd known — somehow he'd known — I would be cold.

We pulled away from the curb.

"Do you need anything?" he asked, eyes on the road.

I watched the lights of the penthouse recede in the side mirror. My hand rested over my belly.

"Just tonight," I said.