All Chapters of Not The Man She Wanted: Chapter 31 - Chapter 40

The clinic was on the west side. Fourteen miles from the penthouse. Twelve from Royal Gold Mine. A neighborhood where no one who worked at either address had any reason to be on a Wednesday afternoon. I had found it the way I found the pharmacy. By traveling in the opposite direction from every person who knew my name. I told Tasha I had a dentist appointment. Told Fabiola nothing because he had a site review in Marietta until six. I took a cab to within three blocks and walked the rest with my collar up and my hair down. My mother's pearl earrings were in a small velvet bag in my coat pocket instead of my ears. The pearl earrings were the one thing about me people remembered. The name I gave at the front desk was the name on a library card I had carried since college and never updated. Jenny Knowles. My old name. Before the contract. Before the thick gold band and the forty-eight floors and the company car and the magazine cover and all the machinery Alvin had built around me.

Veronica knew.That was the thing I carried through the two weeks between her message and the morning I told Fabiola. Not what she knew exactly. Not yet. Because when I met her at the café on Marietta Street the next morning she had arrived before me, ordered nothing, and placed a single photograph on the table before I had even taken my coat off.Me. Outside Harry's warehouse on Holt Street on a Sunday afternoon. Collar up. Hair down. Face turned enough that a professional would know it and a stranger might not."My father-in-law takes photographs," I said."My former employer takes photographs." She picked it up. Put it back in her bag. "That is not his photographer. That is mine."I sat down slowly.She looked at me across the small table with the same tired careful eyes she had brought to my kitchen in the red coat, except the coat today was black and the tired had gone deeper."I'm not here to threaten you. Alvin and I are finished. What he doesn't know will not hurt me.""Then w

The celebration was on Sunday.Alvin's house. Five o'clock. Just family, his text had said. The way a man who has never had a small moment in his life uses the word just.I wore the champagne silk. Not because Alvin had asked this time. Because wearing it now, eight weeks pregnant at a party celebrating a lie, felt like the appropriate level of punishment.Fabiola dressed in the black tuxedo from the gala. He helped me with the clasp of my necklace in the bathroom mirror without being asked. His fingers on the back of my neck. Efficient. Polite. Completely unreadable. I watched his hands in the mirror. I watched his face. He was looking at the clasp."Ready," he said.Not a question.The long driveway was lit from below with white ground lights that made the hedges look like walls of pale fire. The fountain ran blue. A server in black and white opened the car door. The house blazed from every window as if Alvin had turned on every light he owned.Which he had. Because Alvin Alejandro

I called my mother on a Saturday morning and told her I was coming for lunch.Not the Saturday of the dinner. The one before. When I still had seven days and a text from Veronica and a husband putting crackers in his jacket pocket before emergencies arrived and a brother-in-law flying in from wherever Harry spent the weeks he wasn't circling the edges of my life.I needed one morning that belonged to no one's plan.She was on the porch when the cab pulled up.She had heard the engine and came out the way she always came out... before you had paid the driver, before the door was fully open... already moving down the porch steps in her house slippers. The broken back on the left one she refused to replace because the slippers were a gift from my father.She was wearing the new blue coat Alvin had sent.She didn't know it was from him. She had told me when it arrived that she thought it was the nicest thing that had ever been mailed to her and she intended to wear it every day until Jun

I dressed slowly.Not the way I had dressed for the Ashworth gala, with a stylist and a tailor's note and a plan in a black folder. This was slower. More careful. The kind of dressing that has nothing to do with fabric and everything to do with the person you are deciding to be when you walk into a room.The green dress. Long sleeves. The bruise on my wrist had faded to a yellow-green shadow that was almost gone, and the sleeve covered what remained, which felt appropriate in the way only darkly ironic things feel appropriate.My mother's pearl earrings.I stood in front of the mirror for a long moment. My stomach not showing yet. The nausea manageable today, which I took as a small mercy from a universe that had not been handing out many. My face looked like my face. Tasha had said two days ago, you have color. The pregnancy was doing something to my skin that the sleeplessness and the fear and the crackers in the lockbox were not undoing.I did not find this amusing.I found it deep