ANOTHER DISASTER

(Rosa's POV)

The rejection emails all started the same way.

Due to recent concerns regarding your professional conduct…

I stopped reading them in full after the seventh one. There was no point. The ending was always the same.

I closed the laptop and pushed it away from me across Sophie's small kitchen table.

Two weeks. Two weeks of this table, this laptop, these emails. Two weeks of Robbie's handiwork spreading through every professional network I had spent six years building.

Rosa Park had a mental breakdown at her own wedding. Rosa Park is unstable, unreliable, erratic. I didn't know exactly what she'd said or to whom, but the results were clear. Every translation agency in the city had heard some version of the story.

Not one had called back.

Sophie came up from the bakery, flour on her apron, hair escaping its bun. She took one look at my face and set two mugs of tea on the table without asking.

"Any luck?"

"Blacklisted," I said. "Every single one."

Sophie sat down. Wrapped her hands around her mug. Studied me the way she had been studying me for days.

"Rosa." Her voice was gentle. "You've barely eaten. You've been nauseous every morning. You cry at random things." She paused. "Are you feeling okay?"

"It's stress." I picked up the tea. "I'm allowed to be stressed."

"When was your last period?"

The mug stopped halfway to my mouth.

I set it down. Tried to count backward and hit a wall. Before the wedding. Before Vegas. Before everything.

How long ago was that exactly? Three weeks? Four? My cycle had always been regular, reliable, the one thing in my life that showed up on schedule.

Something cold moved through my stomach.

"I don't know," I said quietly. "A while."

Sophie stood up without a word, disappeared into the bathroom, and came back with a small white box. She set it on the table between us like she'd been waiting for the right moment.

A pregnancy test.

I stared at it. "No."

"Rosa—"

"It was one night." I pushed back from the table slightly, like distance from the box would help. "One night doesn't just—that doesn't happen from one night."

"It only takes once." Sophie's voice was calm. Infuriatingly calm. "Just take it. Rule it out."

"I can't be pregnant." The words came out faster than I intended. "Sophie, I have no job. No savings. I'm sleeping in your guest room. I'm legally married to a man who left me a seven-word note and never sent the annulment papers he promised—"

"All the more reason to know." She slid the box an inch closer. "I'll be right here."

I looked at her face. At the box. At my own hands, which were, I noticed, already reaching for it.

The bathroom was the size of a generous closet. I locked the door and sat on the closed toilet lid and read the instructions three times even though I already knew how it worked. Everyone knew how it worked.

My hands would not stop shaking.

I thought about the annulment papers that never came. I'd checked Sophie's mailbox every single day. Nothing. I'd almost called the office twice and stopped both times because what was I going to say?

Your boss married me drunk in Vegas, could you remind him to un-marry me please? I had told myself the silence meant nothing. That corporate lawyers worked slowly. That it was fine.

I thought about Daniel. I tried not to, regularly and unsuccessfully. The gray eyes, the quiet voice, the hands that had touched me like I was something worth being careful with.

I took the test.

Set my phone timer for three minutes.

Stood at the sink and looked at myself in the mirror. Hollow eyes. Pale under my golden-tan skin. Hair I hadn't properly dealt with in days. I looked like someone who had been surviving, not living. Just getting through each hour until the next one.

My phone buzzed.

I looked down at the test on the edge of the sink.

Two pink lines. Both of them dark and clear and completely certain.

My knees buckled. I sat down hard on the bathroom floor, back against the cabinet, test in both hands. The floor was cold through my pajama pants. I stared at those two lines and forgot how to breathe properly.

Pregnant.

I was pregnant.

With Daniel Gosling's baby.

The man who had left me a note about annulment papers was going to be a father. And I was going to be a mother.

Me. Jobless, homeless, broke, blacklisted Rosa Park, who couldn't even get her life back together after one catastrophic week, was going to have a baby.

A knock at the door. Soft. "Rosa?"

"Positive," I choked out.

Sophie came in without hesitating, found me on the floor, and sat down beside me. No questions. She just pulled me into her side and held on.

For a long moment neither of us said anything.

"Okay," she said finally. "Okay. We'll figure this out."

"How?" My voice came out like something broken. "Sophie, how? I have nothing. I have less than nothing. I have negative money and no job." I pressed one hand against my still-flat stomach without thinking. "And now there's going to be a baby and its father is a billionaire who doesn't even know my middle name."

"He has a right to know."

I laughed. It didn't sound right. "He'll think I'm trapping him. That's what people like him think when people like me show up pregnant. Gold-digger. Schemer. This was her plan all along." I leaned my head back against the cabinet. "Maybe that's what everyone will think. Maybe that's what I deserve for being so completely, spectacularly stupid—"

"Stop." Sophie gripped my shoulders and turned me to face her. Her eyes were fierce. "You were hurt and you were reckless and you made a mistake with consequences. That's it. That is the whole story." Her hand moved, hovering gently over mine where it rested on my stomach. "And this baby didn't make any mistakes at all. It's innocent. And Daniel Gosling is going to know about it whether it's comfortable for him or not."

I looked at her for a long moment.

She was right. I hated that she was right, but she was.

An hour later I sat at the kitchen table again. Laptop closed. Tea cold and untouched. My phone in my hand, the Gosling International main number pulled up from their website, the same sleek corporate site with his Forbes photos and his eight-point-seven billion dollars and his hundred hotels.

Sophie sat across from me. Not talking. Just there.

"I don't even know how to start," I said. "What do I say? Hi, remember that night in Vegas three weeks ago? Funny story."

"Just ask for him. Say it's urgent and personal."

I looked at the number. At my phone. At my own thumb hovering over the call button. My heart was beating so hard I could feel it in my throat.

I thought about the baby. About the fact that it existed because of one night when two wrecked people reached for something real and found it and then ran away from it in opposite directions.

I pressed call.

It rang twice.

"Gosling International, how may I direct your call?" Professional, smooth, zero warmth.

"I need to speak with Daniel Gosling." My voice only shook a little. "It's urgent."

"Mr. Gosling is unavailable at the moment. May I take a message?"

"Please tell him Rosa Park called." I closed my eyes. "From Las Vegas. He'll know who I am."

A brief pause. The kind that meant the name had registered somewhere, with someone. "I'll pass along the message. A number where he can reach you?"

I gave Sophie's bakery line. My voice was steady. I don't know how.

The call ended.

I set the phone on the table and looked at Sophie.

"What if he doesn't call back?" I asked.

"Then you call again." Her voice was firm. "As many times as it takes."

I nodded. Looked at the phone.

Minutes passed. I counted them without meaning to. The phone didn't ring.

Sophie refilled my tea.

I pressed my hand against my stomach again, under the table where Sophie couldn't see, and waited for a man who might never call back to decide whether he was going to show up or disappear.

I already knew which one felt more likely.

I just didn't know yet how wrong I was.