Chapter 37: Ask Her Whose

Rachel didn’t throw the photo down the trash chute, although she stood in front of it in the service hallway for a full minute with the little metal door open.

That was what Chloe wanted. A secret. Rachel creeping around with it in her coat pocket, flinching every time Julian’s phone buzzed, waiting for the day Chloe decided to make the call herself in that sugar voice. Julian, sweetie, did she ever tell you?

No.

Rachel shut the chute. She went inside, past Mrs. Ruiz, who looked at her cheek and opened her mouth and then, seeing Rachel’s face, shut it and went to get a bag of frozen peas. Mrs. Ruiz went home at ten. Rachel waited at the island.

Julian came home at eleven-ten, after an investor dinner, by which time Rachel was on her third bag of peas. She heard the elevator, his keys in the bowl, then his footsteps, fast.

“Who did that?”

He’d stopped in the kitchen doorway in his overcoat, briefcase still in his hand. His eyes went to her cheek and his whole face went still, the way it did in board meetings right before somebody got fired.

“Study,” Rachel said. “Please. I need to say something and I need to say it all at once, or I won’t.”

* * *

His study smelled like it always did: leather, paper, the cedar from the fireplace he hardly ever used. The rug she’d once collapsed on, sobbing about a bridge. She’d been on her knees that day. She stayed standing now.

He set the briefcase down, shrugged off the overcoat and threw it over the chair. He didn’t sit. “Rachel. Your face.”

“Chloe. In the courthouse bathroom. After we won.” She held up a hand when he moved. “We won, by the way. Judge quashed the subpoena. That’s not what I need to say.”

“Then say it.”

She’d practiced this on the train. None of it was there now. She put the frozen peas down on his desk, on top of some quarterly report, and he didn’t even glance at them.

“I’m pregnant,” Rachel said.

He didn’t move.

“About seven weeks, give or take. My cycle’s a mess, it’s always been a mess, so the doctor can’t date it, not really. She said it lands right in the middle.” She heard her voice speeding up and couldn’t stop it. “And the middle is a problem, because there are two dates. There’s you. November sixth. And there’s the night before the lockout. October fourteenth. Michael.”

The radiator ticked. Down on Central Park West a cab leaned on its horn.

“So it could be yours,” Rachel said. “Or it could be his. And I don’t know which, and I won’t know for weeks, and I didn’t tell you last week because of what you told me with your head in my lap. I’m sorry.” She swallowed. “Chloe saw me at the clinic. She took a picture. She sent this here tonight, to you. I opened it. I wasn’t letting her be the one to hand it to you.”

She held out the envelope. He took it, slid out the photo, and turned it over to read the card on the back.

Ask her whose.

Then he set it face down on the desk, carefully, square with the edge, the way he lined up everything, and he looked at her. And Rachel braced. For the question any man would ask. Are you sure? Why didn’t you tell me? Why were you sleeping with him at all?

He asked none of those.

“That night,” he said, very low. “The fourteenth. Did he give you a choice?”

Rachel opened her mouth. Nothing came out.

She thought of the kitchen at Linden Court. Michael’s hands on her shoulders, kneading, too tight. Come on, Rach. One last night. Let’s make it right. Her saying she was tired. Her saying she had to be up at five. Her saying, once, very clearly, Michael, I don’t want to, and him laughing softly against her neck like she was being cute, and the long, exhausted moment where she’d figured out how much easier it would be to just let it happen than to fight about it at eleven p.m. on a Wednesday.

She stood in Julian’s study with her mouth open and her eyes burning and couldn’t get a single word out.

That was the answer. She watched him understand it.

A muscle jumped in his cheek. Something went across his face, fast and black, and then it was locked away, back behind the gray eyes, and he came around the desk.

He didn’t hug her. He did something she’d never once seen him do.

He knelt.

Six-foot-three of billionaire in a two-thousand-dollar suit went down on one knee on his own rug in front of her, the way she’d gone down on it six weeks ago, and he put his hand flat on her stomach. Warm through the navy dress. His palm covered it all. Covered everything.

“Look at me.”

She looked down at him. Her face was wet. She hadn’t noticed it start.

“I told you unlikely,” Julian said. “Doctors told me that. Doctors have been wrong about smaller things than this.” His thumb moved, slow, over the dress. “And I’m not interested in what a lab says right now. I’m interested in what I say. So here’s what I say. Until someone proves otherwise, it’s ours.”

“Julian…”

“Ours.”

She put her hand over his. She couldn’t talk. She just held on, his hand under hers, both of them on top of whatever was in there, the lentil with its moth-wing heartbeat.

He stayed down there a long moment. Then he stood up, and kissed her forehead, hard, once, and stepped back.

And then he did something wrong.

He reached past her to the dish on the bookshelf where he dropped the extra set, the keys to the black Audi he drove himself when he didn’t want the driver, and picked them up. He didn’t look at her while he did it. He walked out in his suit and left the overcoat hanging on the chair. Thirty-four degrees outside.

“Julian. Where are you going?”

He didn’t answer. His footsteps went down the hall. The elevator chimed.

Rachel stood alone in the study with frozen peas leaking onto a quarterly report, and the first thing she felt wasn’t fear for him. It was cold and small and it had been waiting for her since the night he told her about Owen’s file.

He’s doing it again. She was the reason again. The excuse he’d been waiting for to go after Michael, the bait on the hook, and he hadn’t asked her. He’d said ours and then walked out the door to decide the rest by himself.

Then the fear came, and it was worse, because she knew where he was going. Michael Hayes would be there at a quarter past eleven on a weeknight, because for years he’d said he was working late, and only now did she know which tower he’d meant.

Fifty-eight floors up, in Hudson Yards.