Chapter 2: His Pregnant Cousin

Just a little longer. Then everything we planned is ours.

I lay there and let the words settle into me like silt, and I did not sleep again.

I told myself I had misheard. People say things half asleep. Plans could mean anything, the nursery, the doctor, the family. I built a dozen soft explanations and laid them over the sentence like blankets, and not one of them covered it.

Adrian came back to bed near four. He did not touch me. He turned to the wall and was asleep in minutes, and I lay beside him listening to him breathe like a man with nothing on his mind.

By morning I had a face ready. Calm. Easy. The one that keeps the peace.

I made his coffee the way he likes it and set it by his hand and waited until he had taken the first sip, because you do not ask a hungry man for anything.

"Can I ask you something," I said. "About last night."

"Mm."

"When you came in. You seemed, I don't know. Worried about her."

He turned a page of whatever was on his phone. "She's seven months pregnant, Elena. Yes, I worry."

"I heard you. In the hall. Late."

His thumb stopped moving on the screen.

"You were listening at doors," he said.

"No, I was, I woke up and you were gone, and I heard voices, and,"

"And you assumed." He set the phone down at last and looked at me, and his face was so patient it made my stomach hurt. "You always do this. You know that? You take a normal thing and you turn it into a knife and then you hand it to me and ask why I'm bleeding."

"That's not,"

"It is. It's exactly what you do." He rubbed his eyes. "You've been like this for months. Suspicious. Cold. I bring my cousin into my home during the hardest time of her life, and instead of helping, you stand in the corner counting my mistakes."

I felt the apology climbing up my throat before I could stop it.

"I'm sorry," I said. "I didn't mean it like that."

And I hated myself. I hated the smallness of it, the speed, the way sorry came out of me automatic as a reflex, the way it always did.

Then something in him softened, and that was worse, because I felt myself lean toward it like a plant toward a window.

"Hey." He reached out and cupped the side of my face, his thumb along my cheekbone, warm, familiar, the way he used to do before any of this. "Look at me."

I looked.

"You used to trust me," he said quietly. "What happened to that girl?"

My eyes stung. I blinked it back.

"She's still here," I said.

"Then act like it." His hand was still on my face, and his voice was still gentle, and that was how I did not see the shape of it until it closed. "My grandfather is coming Thursday. The whole family. I need you to be warm to Isabella. Welcoming. Not this."

"Adrian,"

"Can you do that for me? For us?" His thumb moved once, soft. "Don't embarrass me in front of them, Elena. I'm asking you nicely."

There it was. The tenderness had a leash on the end of it, and I had walked right into the loop.

"Of course," I said.

"Good girl." He let go of my face and picked his phone back up. "Now go on. She'll be up soon and she likes to eat early."

I stood in my own kitchen and understood that I had just been managed, and that I had thanked him for it.

Isabella came down a few minutes later in a robe I did not recognize, one hand under the curve of her belly, glowing in a way I could not decide was real.

"Good morning." She lowered herself into a chair like she had done it a hundred times. "Oh, don't fuss, I'll just have what Adrian's having."

"He hasn't eaten yet. I was about to make eggs."

"Soft in the middle," she said. "But take them off the heat before they look done. If you wait until they look done, they're already ruined."

My whisk went still in the bowl.

That was true. It had taken me half a year of burned pans to learn it. He had never once told me.

"How do you know that," I said.

Isabella smiled at her tea. "He must have mentioned it."

"He mentioned how he likes his eggs. To his cousin."

"We talk." She lifted one shoulder. "Family talks."

Adrian walked in then, and the kitchen rearranged itself around him.

"She takes her tea without sugar," he said, sitting. "Don't put sugar in front of her, the smell's been making her sick."

"I know how she takes her tea now, do I," I said, before I could stop myself, and it came out softer than it felt.

"Elena." One word. A warning dressed as my name.

"He quit sugar too," Isabella offered, gently, into the quiet. "Years ago. And no lemon in the evenings, it gives him heartburn. You have to watch that."

She said it like a kindness. Like she was helping me care for my own husband.

I gripped the edge of the counter and smiled and said nothing, because Thursday was coming and I had promised to be warm.

Her phone buzzed on the table, face up.

She turned it face down so fast the spoon jumped in her saucer, and she kept talking without a pause, and Adrian did not look up, and I filed it away with everything else.

"Anyway." Isabella reached for the teapot, and her sleeve slid back from her wrist. "It's really no trouble, Elena. I want us to be close."

I was not listening anymore.

I was looking at the thin gold bracelet on her wrist. The delicate chain. The single small stone, set just slightly off center, the kind of flaw that makes a thing custom instead of cheap.

I knew that bracelet.

Not one like it. That one.

Eight months ago I had found the receipt for it folded at the back of Adrian's locked drawer, twenty-two hundred dollars, and I had asked him about it, careful, casual, and he had smiled and said it was a gift for a client, and I had kissed him and believed it and never thought of it again.

Eight months ago. Long before any cousin needed somewhere quiet to stay.

I set my cup down on the counter, slow, both hands, because my fingers had started to shake and I did not want it to shatter in my grip.