Chapter 10: His Suspicious Eyes

ANDRIY

I keep my word for exactly six days.

Six days of not calling her office, not driving past that café, not letting myself show up anywhere she might mistake for another attempt to corner her into an answer. Six days of sitting in meetings I don't fully hear, signing contracts I barely read, my mind circling back again and again to a woman with pale hands pressed against her stomach and a voice that shook when she told me not to come near her.

I told myself space meant space. I told myself I could be patient.

I'm not built for patience. I'm starting to remember that the hard way.

On the seventh day, my assistant sets a folder on my desk without me asking for it.

"You wanted background on the account contacts for the Whitmore deal," he says. "I pulled everyone's files while I was at it. Thought it might save time."

I almost tell him I don't need it. Almost.

Instead, I open the folder, and there, three pages in, is her employment record — start date, position, department. Nothing unusual. Nothing that should hold my attention the way it does.

Except for one line near the bottom. A short medical leave request, filed and later withdrawn, dated almost exactly two months after the night I left a hotel room before sunrise and told myself it didn't need to mean anything.

I stare at the date longer than I should.

I do the math again, the same calculation I've run a dozen times since that meeting room, and this time it lands somewhere I can't talk myself out of anymore.

Two months.

Long enough for a woman to find out. Long enough for fear to set in, and silence, and every careful, practiced lie I've watched her tell me since the day I walked back into her life.

"Sir?" My assistant is still standing there, waiting for some kind of response I haven't given him. "Is something wrong with the file?"

"No." I close the folder, my voice steadier than I feel. "That's all for now."

He leaves. I sit alone with the closed folder in front of me, my hand resting flat against it the way hers rests against her stomach, an unconscious mirror of a gesture I still don't think she knows I've memorized.

I think about the hotel bar. About tired eyes that looked older than they should have, and a laugh that came easier than I expected from a woman clearly carrying more than she let on even then. I think about the note I left on the pillow, brief and careful, the kind of note a man writes when he's decided in advance that morning isn't a conversation he's willing to have.

I've never regretted a note before.

I do now.

• • •

I don't call her. I don't show up at her office. I keep the six days of restraint intact, because some stubborn, unfamiliar instinct tells me that pushing harder will only teach her to run faster.

Instead, I watch.

It isn't difficult. She works three floors below one of my regular meeting rooms in a building I now find reasons to visit more often than the account strictly requires. I notice things I didn't let myself notice before, back when I was telling myself this was simple curiosity, unfinished business, nothing more.

I notice she skips the coffee cart most mornings now, where she used to stop every single day. I notice the careful way she lowers herself into chairs, like her body is negotiating terms with her before it agrees to sit. I notice, one afternoon through the glass wall of a conference room, the exact moment pain crosses her face during a phone call, quick and controlled, gone before anyone else seems to catch it.

I catch it every time.

"You're staring again," my assistant says quietly, following my line of sight through the glass. "Sir, if there's an issue with the account—"

"There's no issue with the account."

He has the sense not to ask anything further.

I turn back to my own reflection in the window instead, layered faintly over the view of the office below, and let myself finally say the thing I've been circling for a week without letting it fully land.

She's pregnant. She's pregnant, and I'm almost certain, in the quiet, unshakeable way I'm certain about very little else in my life, that the children she's protecting behind that careful, practiced armor are mine.

I don't know why she hasn't told me outright. Fear, maybe. Or something worse — some belief that I'd react the way men like me are so often written to react, with cold calculation instead of anything resembling care.

I want to prove her wrong. I don't yet know how, not without frightening her further, not without confirming every reason she's had to keep this from me in the first place.

So I watch. I wait. I let six days become seven, and seven become a careful, patient distance I've never had to practice with anyone before her.

But patience has never been the thing I'm best at, and every day I watch her hand find her stomach in some unguarded moment, some part of me gets closer to walking straight into her office and asking the one question I already know the answer to.

Are they mine, Brabra?

I already know they are.

What I don't know yet is what I'm going to do about it, or how much longer I can watch her carry this alone before I stop respecting the space she asked for and start fighting for the one thing I've never had to fight for in my life.

A place in a family I didn't know I wanted until the moment I found out it already existed.

I close the blinds on the conference room window before anyone can catch me staring for the fourth time this hour, and I sit back down at my desk with a folder full of contracts I have no intention of reading right now.

Somewhere below me, three floors down, a woman with tired eyes and a secret too heavy to carry alone has no idea how closely I've already found her out.

Soon, I tell myself.

Soon, she isn't going to have a choice but to let me in.

• • •

BRABRA

I feel it before I can name it — the sense that something has shifted, quiet and unseen, the way weather changes long before the first cloud actually arrives.

He hasn't called in a week. He hasn't shown up at my desk or followed me into any more cafés, and for the first few days, that absence felt like relief, exactly the space I asked him for. But somewhere around day five, the relief started curdling into something else. A watchfulness I can't quite explain. A feeling, every time I glance up from my desk, that I'm being seen even when no one else is in the room.

I tell myself I'm imagining it. Exhaustion does strange things to a person's sense of the world, and I've had more than enough exhaustion to spare these past weeks.

But today, walking out of a meeting three floors up from my own, I glance toward the glass wall of a conference room I don't usually pass, and for one brief second, I catch him there. Watching. Not the careful, unreadable expression he wears in every meeting I've sat through with him, but something rawer, something that looks almost like he's been caught at it.

He looks away first.

I stand frozen in the hallway a moment longer than I should, my hand finding my stomach the way it always does now, an anchor in a day that just tilted slightly off its axis.

He knows. Or he's close enough to knowing that the distance between us has stopped being a question of if and started being a question of when.

I walk the rest of the way to my desk on legs that don't feel entirely steady, and I sit down slowly, both hands pressed flat against my stomach beneath the desk where no one can see.

"He's watching us," I whisper, so quietly it barely stirs the air. "I don't know for how long. I don't know how much he's figured out. But I felt it today, and I don't think I imagined it."

I think about the folded note on that hotel pillow, and how easily a man like that can disappear when something becomes inconvenient. I think about his hand steadying me in that hallway, the fear in his voice that had nothing controlled about it at all. Two versions of the same man, and I still don't know, not with any certainty, which one is going to be waiting for me when the truth finally, inevitably, forces its way out from behind every careful lie I've told to protect it.

"Not yet," I whisper, the same two words I've been repeating for weeks now, worn smooth from use but no less true tonight than they were the first time I said them. "Just a little more time. That's all I'm asking for."

Outside my window, the city keeps moving, indifferent to the quiet, watchful distance stretching between a man determined to find his answer and a woman running out of places left to hide it.

I don't know how much longer that distance is going to hold.

Something tells me I'm about to find out.