CHAPTER SIXTEEN

They didn't discuss the kiss. Aria thought this was probably what would happen. Adrian Morelli was the type of man who could stare at a dinner table for three weeks without carrying out a single unnecessary conversation - certainly, he was not going to make the loss of control in a dark terrace incident his topic. Aria, on the other hand, not wanting to reveal her emotional inventory to anyone, also did not bring it up. Instead, they did a very special kind of avoiding each other - the kind of avoidance that exists only between two people who are so determined not to look at each other directly that they try everything else to keep from doing so. Hence, she went to the Institute earlier. He remained in his study later. They walked through the penthouse as if they were two magnets that are held at the same pole - always almost the same distance apart, making small movements without showing that they are actually making adjustments, keeping the distance with the careful, mutual weariness of two people who understand that if they get closer, it will mean a talk that they both do not know how to have yet. Besides all that, silently and with every day becoming more and more certain, there was the thing that she had been preparing herself for the entire time ever since that night in the terrace - the realization that she was in love with him. Truly, really, and inconveniently in love with a man who, after kissing her unintentionally, had hidden behind twenty-three years of well-constructed walls.

This was not in her plans at all. The contract was nothing more than a business deal to her. She just signed it with a ballpoint pen in the dark and the thought that she will have to give up the child in 3 years for 5 million dollars. She was not planning to fall in love with the person who wrote the contract. However. She made up her mind on a Tuesday afternoon after a draping session and a fabric theory class that she was no longer going to wait. She was fed up with choosing silence. She locked her feelings for Jeffery for four years, took a bite of her own emotions every day until she was almost made up of the sum of the things left unsaid, and she had also promised herself while sitting on the floor in the storage unit in Greenpoint with her mother's journal that she would not do it again. She was going to double-cross him. She was going to get him on that very night and tell him plainly without any dance, preparation, or maneuvers because she realized that plainness was the only thing that people who are honest can really barter in, and Adrian Morelli, whatever else he was, was truthful. She went out of the Institute at 5:30 pm and headed to where Marcus had the car ready. The world of this girl and the night never crossed paths. She recalled the vehicle coming from the left side. She recalled the noise that was huge, immediate and quite out of place, the kind of out of place that one's body perceives before one's brain. She remembered the feeling of the hit as a sort of detached, remote thing - the world restaging itself around a point of violence she was at the center of. After that, she did not remember anything for a while. - She roused to the sight of a fluorescent bulb and the smell of a hospital which was very typical - antiseptic yet there was another layer of smell which was nothing but grief; the grief that one accumulates after the entire life of one difficult thing in a room like this one. Her head was throbbing. Her left arm was hurting. Her whole body had the heavy, dazed quality of one who was just interrupted. Her hand was first to touch the stomach before she was fully aware. The nurse who was going to attend to her was already in the room; she made a move quickly and that movement made Aria understand the whole situation. Also, she got the confirmation before the speaker opened his mouth. She did. She was frozen when the doctor talked - beautiful, soft words in a beautiful, soft voice, a voice that one makes point of learning specifically for times like this one - and as she turned her eyes to the fluorescent bulb above her and sensed the grief landing not as a crashing tide, the way she had always thought, but as a going-away. A shushing. As if some vital line that had been going through her from the day she got the positive result had just switched off, and what followed was silence.

Adrian found out about the accident about forty minutes later at the hospital. At the time, he was in his office, attending a meeting with three board members and two lawyers and discussing the development proposal which he was planning for six months when the phone rang. Marcus. Two words. Without a word of explanation, he left the meeting. He was informed that she was stable. He was told that the accident was not life-threatening. Rationally, he knew this, the way he knew most things as information that has been processed and filed. He just could not imagine what it would be like arriving at the hospital only to be told, in the corridor outside the ER, that the pregnancy had not survived the accident. The doctor was still talking when Adrian lost the ability to hear him. Standing in the corridor with the sound of the hospital operations around him, he felt something inside him give way not break exactly, but open, the way a room opens when you take down a wall you thought was structural, and suddenly everything is shaped differently and the air comes from a direction you weren't expecting. Until now, he had not really realized that he wanted the child. He had just written an heir into a contract. He had planned a marriage and a household and a set of appearances. He had really convinced himself, with the same thoroughness that he used for all his self-deceptions, that it was legacy. Strategy. Rational continuation of a family line.

He didn't realize it until the very minute he was informed that it had disappeared that it had turned into a totally different thing. In fact, during months of breakfast talks and evenings on the terrace and a woman comforting him in his nightmare without him asking for it, it had unintentionally turned into something that wouldn't even be termed strategical by him. He stayed in the hallway for quite a while. Then, going in, he looked for her.