Chapter Six

|| Evelyn ||

I didn't move for a long time.

The bathroom tile was cold through my jeans, and the pregnancy test sat in the sink like an accusation, its two lines bright and damning and utterly indifferent to the fact that they were destroying my life. I stared at it from the floor where I'd slid down against the cabinet, knees pulled to my chest, arms wrapped tight around myself like if I held on hard enough I could keep from completely falling apart.

Pregnant.

I was pregnant.

By a man I thought was a call boy. Who was actually a billionaire. Who was also my childhood hero. Who was now my landlord and apparently my neighbor for the foreseeable future and who had looked at me this afternoon like I was something he'd been searching for and found and had absolutely no intention of letting go.

The hysterical laughter came again, short and broken. I pressed the back of my hand against my mouth to muffle it.

Three percent chance. Three percent, and here we were.

I grabbed my phone off the counter and called Jade before I could talk myself out of it. It rang twice.

"Eve?" She picked up immediately, voice sharp with concern. "You've been quiet all day. I was about to drive over. What happened?"

I opened my mouth. Closed it. Tried again.

"I took the test."

Silence. Then, carefully: "And?"

"Two lines, Jade."

The sound she made was somewhere between a gasp and a squeal. "Oh my God. Oh my God, Eve--"

"Do not celebrate. Do not make that noise. Do not--"

"I'm coming over."

"Jade--"

"I'm already in the car."

She hung up.

I was still sitting on the bathroom floor twenty minutes later when I heard her letting herself in with the spare key I'd given her that morning. Her footsteps were fast on the stairs. She appeared in the doorway holding a paper bag in one hand and a bottle of sparkling water in the other, because Jade was the kind of person who showed up prepared for every version of a crisis.

She took one look at me, set everything down on the counter, and lowered herself to sit cross-legged on the tile directly in front of me.

"Hey," she said quietly.

"Hey."

She reached over and squeezed my hand. We sat like that for a minute without speaking, which was one of the things I loved most about Jade Chen--she understood that sometimes you needed the silence before you could use words.

We'd met at nineteen, two girls working double shifts at the same downtown restaurant, comparing tips and sharing cigarettes on the back steps. She'd been the one to talk me through every crisis since--my mother's diagnosis, my wedding, the first time I'd found evidence of Marcus's cheating and hadn't known what to do with it. She was loud and sharp and fearlessly herself in a way I had never managed to be, and she loved me with a ferocity that still sometimes caught me off guard.

"Tell me everything," she said finally.

So I told her. All of it. The test. Sebastian showing up at the door. The breakfast. The thing he'd said--you're not going anywhere--in that utterly calm, completely certain voice. And then the part that still made my pulse do something complicated and embarrassing: little storm.

Jade listened without interrupting, which was remarkable for her. When I finished, she was quiet for a long moment.

"Okay," she said. "So your one-night stand is your landlord, your childhood savior, and apparently a man who's been looking for you for ten years. And you're carrying his baby."

"That is an accurate summary. Yes."

"And your response to him showing up was to run away."

"I panicked."

"Eve." She said it gently but with the kind of firmness that meant she was about to say something I didn't want to hear. "You have to stop running. At some point you have to stop."

"I know."

"You've been running since you were fourteen. You ran straight into Marcus's arms because you were scared and broke and didn't know what else to do. You ran through five years of a marriage that was killing you because leaving felt impossible. And now something real is standing right next door and your first instinct is to bolt." She tilted her head. "What does that tell you?"

I stared at the ceiling. "That I have deeply ingrained avoidance issues?"

"That you're terrified of wanting something that could actually be good."

The words landed somewhere tender. I didn't answer.

Jade reached into the paper bag and produced crackers and a container of hummus and slid them toward me. "Eat something. And then I need to tell you something I found. About Marcus."

I sat up straighter. "What did you find?"

She'd been quietly investigating Marcus for weeks--I'd known, had let her, because Jade had contacts and instincts and a stubbornness that made her genuinely dangerous when she decided to dig into something. She pulled out her phone and turned it to face me.

"Marcus's empire has a silent partner. Someone who's been funneling money through shell companies tied to Hart Industries for at least seven years. The paper trail is deliberately obscured, but it's there if you know how to look." She paused. "I don't have a name yet. But whoever it is, they have serious resources and zero interest in being found."

My stomach dropped. "Marcus is laundering money?"

"It looks that way. Which means your divorce settlement--the ten billion, the mansion, all of it--it came from a man whose money isn't entirely clean." She held my gaze. "Which also means you might want to be very careful about how visible you become, Eve. And who you trust."

I thought about Sebastian. About the way he'd said her name would be safe. About the certainty in his voice.

"I need to tell him," I said. "Sebastian. About the baby. Before he finds out another way."

Jade nodded slowly. "On your terms. Your timeline."

"Tomorrow," I said. "I'll tell him tomorrow."

She reached over and tucked a strand of hair behind my ear, the way she'd done since we were nineteen.

"You're not alone in this, Eve. Whatever comes next--you're not alone."

I pressed my lips together against the sting behind my eyes. "I know."

"Good." She patted my knee and stood, pulling me up with her. "Now eat the hummus. You're growing a person. You need the protein."

I laughed despite everything. Short and real.

It was the first genuine laugh I'd had in six weeks.