Face-to-Face With the CEO

BRABRA

The ache wakes me before my alarm does, a low pull that's become almost familiar now, though I still hate it every single time.

I lie still for a moment, one hand pressed against my stomach, breathing through it the way I've learned to do without thinking. Dr. Adaora said this was normal. Growing pains, she called them, the body making room for two instead of one. Normal doesn't make it easier to face alone in the dark at six in the morning.

I get up anyway. I always get up anyway.

By the time I reach the office, I've already rehearsed my face in the elevator mirror twice — steady eyes, easy shoulders, nothing that gives away the night I actually had. It's becoming a routine now, this quiet performance I put on before I even sit down at my desk.

Three days pass after the meeting, and I convince myself the worst of it is over.

I tell myself he was simply being polite in that hallway, the kind of thing powerful men say to fill an awkward silence before they walk away and forget it ever happened. I tell myself a lot of things these days. Most of them aren't true, but they get me through the mornings.

I'm at my desk, halfway through a spreadsheet that refuses to make sense no matter how many times I look at it, when my coworker leans over the partition between us.

"Someone's here for you," she says, eyebrows raised in a way that tells me this is not a delivery driver or a lost client.

"Who?"

She doesn't answer. She just tilts her head toward the front of the office, and I don't need her to say the name out loud, because I already know. I feel it the way you feel a change in weather before the first drop of rain falls.

I stand slowly, smoothing my blouse down over a stomach that still looks the same as it always has, though it doesn't feel that way anymore. I press my palm flat against it for one steadying second before I make myself walk toward the front of the office.

He's standing near the reception desk, hands in his pockets, looking entirely out of place among our cluttered desks and half-dead office plants. He looks like he belongs somewhere with marble floors and floor-to-ceiling windows, not here, under fluorescent lights that hum too loudly.

"Andriy." His name comes out steadier than I feel saying it. "This is a surprise."

"Is it?" His eyes hold mine, unreadable, the same way they were in that hallway. "I had a few questions about the contract. I thought it would be more efficient to bring them to you directly."

"You could have emailed."

"I could have." A small pause. "I wanted to see the office."

I don't believe that for a second, and something in his expression tells me he doesn't expect me to.

"There's a meeting room in the back," I say, because standing here under the curious glances of half my coworkers feels like standing in the middle of a stage I never auditioned for.

He follows me down the narrow hallway, close enough that I'm aware of every step I take, every breath, the way my body has started aching by mid-afternoon lately, a low pull low in my back that I'm fighting to ignore right now more than ever.

I open the door to the small meeting room and gesture him in ahead of me. He doesn't move.

"After you," he says.

I step past him, careful to keep enough distance between us that I don't have to feel how close he actually is, and settle into a chair at the small round table. He takes the one across from me instead of beside me, and for that, at least, I'm grateful.

"So." I fold my hands on the table to keep them from shaking. "What questions did you have?"

He watches me for a long moment before he answers, long enough that I start to wonder if the questions were ever real at all.

"The delivery timeline in section four," he says finally, sliding a folder across the table. "It doesn't match what we discussed verbally on the call last week."

I open the folder and scan the page, grateful for something concrete to focus on instead of the weight of his attention. "That's an error on our end. I can have it corrected by tomorrow morning."

"Good." A beat. "You look tired, Brabra."

My head snaps up. "Excuse me?"

"Tired," he repeats, unbothered, like he's simply stating a fact about the weather. "You didn't look like this the night we met."

Heat rushes into my face, part embarrassment, part something closer to panic. "That's not really something you get to comment on."

"No," he agrees, surprising me. "It isn't. I apologize."

I close the folder harder than necessary. "Is there anything else about the contract?"

"No." He leans back slightly in his chair, studying me the way he did across that conference table, like I'm a problem he hasn't finished solving yet. "Just the timeline."

Silence stretches between us, heavier than it should be for two people discussing shipping dates.

"Why did you really come here?" I ask, before I can stop myself.

Something flickers across his face. Surprise, maybe, that I asked so directly. "I told you. The contract."

"You could have called me instead of driving across the city."

"I could have." He doesn't elaborate further, and I don't push, because some part of me is afraid of what the honest answer might actually be, and an even bigger part of me is afraid of how much I might want to hear it.

A dull ache pulls low in my stomach, sharper than the ones I've been managing all week, and I press my hand flat against the table's edge instead of my body, trying to breathe through it without letting my face show anything at all.

"Are you all right?" His voice sharpens slightly, and I realize I wasn't as careful as I thought.

"I'm fine." I force a smile that feels brittle even to me. "Long week."

He doesn't look convinced, but he doesn't push either, and for that small mercy, I'm grateful.

"I should get back to my desk," I say, standing before the ache can worsen in front of him. "I'll have the timeline corrected by morning."

He stands too, close enough now that I have to tilt my head back slightly to hold his gaze. "Brabra."

"Yes?"

"If something's wrong," he says, quieter now, "you can tell me. I'm not as difficult to talk to as people assume."

For one dangerous second, the words sit right at the edge of my mouth, ready to spill out of me the way water spills over a glass filled too full. I imagine what it would feel like to simply say it. I'm pregnant. They're yours. I'm terrified and I don't know how to do this alone.

I swallow the words down instead.

"Nothing's wrong," I say. "I promise."

It's the second promise I've made this week that I don't fully believe myself.

He studies me a moment longer, like he's deciding whether to push, and then, mercifully, he steps back and lets me leave the room first.

I don't look back until I've reached my desk, and even then, only for a second, just long enough to see him still standing near the front doors, watching me the way you watch something you haven't figured out yet.

My hand finds my stomach the moment I sit down, hidden beneath the desk where no one can see.

"That was close," I whisper. "Too close."

I don't know how many more of these near misses I have in me before the truth finds a crack in my armor wide enough to escape through.

•  •

That night, I sit at my kitchen table with the corrected timeline open on my laptop, though I've reread the same paragraph four times without absorbing a single word of it.

I keep thinking about the way he said my name in that meeting room. Not the way he said it across the conference table, careful and professional, but softer, like he was testing whether it still fit the woman he remembered from a hotel bar months ago.

If something's wrong, you can tell me.

I press my palm against my stomach and let out a breath I didn't realize I was holding.

"He can't find out," I whisper to the two small lives that have no idea how close they came today to being discovered by the one person I've spent weeks hiding them from. "Not yet. I'm not ready."

I don't know if I'm protecting them, or protecting myself, or protecting some fragile idea of a future where I get to decide how and when this truth comes out, instead of having it taken from me in a meeting room with fluorescent lights and a folder full of shipping dates.

I close the laptop and rest my forehead against my folded arms on the table, exhausted in a way that has nothing to do with the hour.

Tomorrow, I tell myself, I'll be more careful.

I don't yet know how much more careful I'm going to have to become.