#chapter 3: I’ll explain everything tomorrow

Olivia POV 

I make it outside before the first tear falls. I make it to the parking garage before the rest of them come, quiet and fast, the kind of crying that doesn't announce itself with sound because I trained it out of myself years ago — in waiting rooms, in restaurant bathrooms, in the back seat of cars exactly like this one. I sit behind the wheel with my forehead against the cool leather and let myself have ninety seconds of it, no more, the way I always do, and then I wipe my face with the heel of my hand and breathe until my chest stops shaking.

My phone rings before I've even left the parking garage. Grace, Damian's assistant, her voice pitched too careful, too rehearsed, like she practiced this call twice before dialing.

"Mrs. Sterling, I'm so sorry to bother you." A pause, like she's choosing each word off a shelf. "Mr. Sterling asked me to let you know he won't be able to make it in this afternoon. Miss Duval collapsed a short while ago. He's had her admitted to Harrowgate Medical. It's serious. He's with her now."

I sit with the engine off, my hand flat on the wheel, and do the math nobody asked me to do. Collapsed. A short while ago. I left that hotel room less than two hours ago, and the woman I left in that bed wasn't a woman five minutes from collapsing — she was a woman stretching lazily against pillows, entirely pleased with herself, telling me I should probably go.

"When, exactly?" I ask, and my voice comes out flat and stripped of anything soft.

"Just after ten, I believe. The doctors are saying it's aggressive. Terminal, potentially."

Just after ten. I was standing in that doorway at nine-forty.

I turn that timeline over in my head twice, looking for the crack in it, and I find it immediately this time, because I don't have to guess anymore. I know exactly what "before" looked like, because I watched it with my own eyes an hour ago, and it did not look like a woman about to be rushed to a hospital. It looked like a woman who'd just gotten exactly what she came back to this city for.

"Thank you for calling, Grace," I say, and hang up before she can hear what's underneath my voice.

The penthouse is dark when I get home, and it stays dark. I don't turn on the lights. I don't set the table tonight. I sit in the chair by the window, still in my coat, and let the apartment stay exactly as unlit as I feel.

I think about calling my mother, and then I think about what she'd actually say if I did — don't do anything rash, Olivia, think about your father — and I don't reach for the phone. That's the part no one outside this family would understand. My father's fortune had already been thinning for a decade by the time I was old enough to notice, and the debt he owed Richard Sterling wasn't the kind you paid off with an apology. My marrying Damian was the payment. I knew that walking down the aisle, and I told myself it didn't matter, because I loved him enough for the arrangement to feel almost like a coincidence instead of a transaction. Five years later, in the dark, I finally let myself admit that a transaction is exactly what it always was — and that leaving Damian doesn't just mean leaving a husband, it means handing my father a bill he can't pay.

Damian, to his credit, has never once made me feel the weight of that. He's never once been cruel with money, never dangled it, never reminded me what I owe him just by existing in his house. He's generous, actually — the cards, the accounts, whatever I've ever asked for, given without a second thought. That's supposed to be enough. For a long time I told myself it was.

Sitting here now, I understand it never was. Money kept me comfortable. It never once kept me warm.

I think about a rolled set of blueprints left on a chair like a prop nobody bothered to hide. I think about a woman's laugh that had nothing sick in it at all — bright, satisfied, certain of itself. I think about the particular, deliberate cruelty of watching me stand in that doorway and then, an hour later, deciding illness was the story that would keep him. I think about every dinner I ate alone at that table behind me, every anniversary he apologized for missing without ever once making the next one different.

But underneath the crying, something else is sitting very still, waiting its turn. The embryo. The forty-eight hours. Whatever else happens tonight, whatever Damian decides about Talia, there's a version of tomorrow where the phone rings and Dr. Nazari tells me something worked, something took, and for the first time in five years the thing I've wanted most won't depend on Damian looking at me the right way at all. It'll just be mine.

I hold onto that thought the way I used to hold onto small kindnesses — carefully, like it might not survive being examined too closely — and let it be the one warm thing in a very dark apartment.

My phone lights up at 11:58.

Don't wait up. I'll explain everything tomorrow.

I read it three times.

The first time, I look for an apology hidden somewhere in it, but I don’t find one.

The second time, I look for anything that acknowledges what I actually saw, but there is nothing.

The third time, I stop looking for meaning and just stare at the words themselves, plain and flat, like I’m an inconvenience he’s managing from a hospital hallway between more important things—as if I don’t already know exactly what “everything” is going to leave out.

I put the phone down, screen dark and face-down on the nightstand.

Then I lie there in the darkness on my side of a bed that has felt too big for years, one hand pressed against my stomach out of habit, and let myself cry the way I didn’t let myself cry in the garage.

Without counting.

Without a limit.

Without caring how ugly it is or how long it takes.

I cry until my chest aches and my tears run cold against my face.

I had thought the worst had already happened on that 9th floor.

But as I stared into the darkness, one quiet thought refused to leave me.

Maybe I still didn’t know what today had really taken from me.