CHAPTER FOUR: She Knew About My Baby

ARIA

I let the phone ring twice before I answer, my thumb hovering over the screen, heart beating fast.

“Aria,” Victoria’s voice, warm and careful. “How’s your father and the loans?”

My whole body goes cold. “Are you calling to spite me, Victoria?”

She laughs, soft and unhurried. “You should be more careful, Aria.” A pause. “Does Damian know you’re carrying his child?”

The room tilts. I can’t breathe. The phone nearly slips from my hand.

“What child?” My voice comes out slowly.

“Don’t try to play games with me, Aria. You really thought no one noticed the hospital visit and the test?” She pauses again, letting those words settle deep into the phone and my heart.

I just want to end the call and tell her never to dial my line again. But my fingers refuse to work, and my ear yearns to hear what will hurt my heart more.

“Damian doesn’t know,” she says, “and he must never know.”

I am already pacing the room now.  “Why?”

“He already believes you are the one who betrayed him and the company. You know what Damian can do when he wants something, Aria. Don’t you?”

I do not answer. My knees are almost giving out. I clutch the edges of the couch and sit down.

“Money. Influence. Lawyers…” she whispers, voice deliberately low, “do you really think you can keep his child from him?”

My head spins. I press my palm flat against my face.

“Now imagine him learning you hid his child on top of everything else he already believes about you.”

“You’re lying.”

The words escape my mouth, but I am not sure of them. I cannot vouch for them. I am just saying them to convince myself.

“But your voice is breaking,” she laughs, harder and more scornful this time.

I still cannot bring myself to end the call and save myself from the humiliation.

“The Black SUV.”

Three words, delivered without any explanation, but manages to destabilize me.

My hand tightens around the phone until it hurts.

Victoria lets out another humourless laugh. “It rings a bell, right? You got lucky the first time. Don’t wait to find out what happens the second.”

The line goes dead before I can answer.

I sit there for a long time, telling myself she is lying. Manipulating me the way she’s manipulated everyone since the day she walked back into my life wearing my best friend’s face.

But my hands are shaking, and they won’t stop, and some part of me already knows the difference between fear someone plants and fear that was already growing there, waiting for a name.

I’m at the hospital within an hour, my father’s hand gripped in both of mine, my whole body trembling too hard to hide from him.

I had decided I was going to keep the pregnancy away from him due to the circumstances surrounding till I decide what to do with it. And also, because of his health.

But now, I cannot afford to hold it any longer.

“I’m pregnant.”

His eyes fill instantly. “His?”

I nod, unable to speak.

“Does he know?”

“No.” My voice breaks apart on the next. “But Victoria does,” I pause to watch his face, “she called me today.”

He exhales. “What does she want?”

“I do not know, Dad,” my lips are shaking, “I received a photo of her and Damian before she called. She also said someone’s been watching me, Dad. It's true. A car. I saw it from the day of the wedding.”

His grip on my hand tightens, and for the first time since he woke up, I see real fear on his face.

“Did you wrong your best friend in any way, Aria?”

That question pushes the tears I was withholding to flow.

Victoria and I never had any altercation. In fact, we never kept malice even after a quarrel, no matter how serious it was.

“Nothing, Dad,” I whisper between tears.

For a brief moment, silence swallows the room. My father stares deep into the ceiling for seconds as if counting them.

“You’ve got to go away, Aria.”

I freeze, half standing, then sit back down hard. “Dad! Why?”

“You’re no longer safe here. You know what will happen if he finds out you’re with his child.” He struggles to sit upright. “Aria, I promised your mum I would never sit and watch any harm befall you.”

The tears are flowing hard now.

“The proceeds from the sale of the land are enough for us to survive with after paying the debts. Please, you need to stay alive. And your child.”

His palm covers mine. “Don’t worry about me. I will take care of myself. I don’t want them to harm you. You’re all I have.”

My entire body is shaking. “Dad, are you sure?”

“I will call my brother. He stopped by this afternoon and wants me to come stay with him a while. I will be fine. Better than fine.”

I want to argue. I want to tell him I can protect both of us, that I am not going to run and leave him in a city that just showed me exactly how little it protects people like us.

But I look at his hand in mine, still weak, still healing. And then my stomach, flat, yet hiding the one thing in this whole nightmare still small enough to save.

“You are all I have,” he says again, quieter. “And that child is all you have left to protect now.”

Something in me breaks and rebuilds itself at the same time.

“Okay,” I whisper, “Okay, Dad.”

My uncle arrives the next afternoon, kind and calm. He helps my father into the car with a gentleness that makes me want to cry again, right there on the sidewalk, until my father squeezes my hand one last time and tells me not to.

“He will be receiving treatment from home,” my uncle says.

I do not listen. All I think of is a time without my father by my side. I do not know when the tears flow again, harder than since my life became a nightmare.

“Go,” he says. “Before you change your mind.”

After they depart, I pack that night. One suitcase. A few clothes. My father’s photograph on top, his younger face smiling up at me.

Before I leave, I stand at the window one last time. No SUV tonight. Just an empty street.

I place one hand over my stomach. “I’ll protect you,” I whisper. “Whatever it takes.”

I pick up my suitcase and leave the city that same night.

Damian has no idea he has a child coming into the world. And by the time he would find out, I would be long gone.