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

113 Chapters

Chapter 31: The Calculation

He was in the kitchen when I came out. Not drunk. Not disheveled. Standing at the counter in his Ashworth suit, jacket off, sleeves rolled to the elbows, reading something on his phone. A glass of water. The remains of a takeout container he had stopped for on the way home. He looked up. "You look pale." "Headache. All day." "Did you eat." "I had lunch." That careful look again. The one he had been wearing since Sunday morning. The look of a man examining something he broke and repaired and still isn't certain about. Then his eyes went back to his phone. "There's extra in the bag if you want it." "Thank you." I went past him to the refrigerator. Stood in front of it with the door open and looked at the shelves and saw none of it. Took out the orange juice. Poured a glass. Drank it at the counter with my back to him and felt the cold go all the way down into my stomach where the two pink lines were living now. Quiet. Permanent. Already changing the chemistry of everything. "

Chapter 32: The Doctor's Office

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.

Chapter 33: The Lie Begins

I went home at seven and made dinner.Not takeout. Not the careful eggs from the apology morning. Real dinner. The kind my mother made when she wanted to say something she didn't have words for yet. Chicken thighs in a cast iron pan. Garlic, lemon, dried thyme I had bought three weeks ago and never opened. Rice on the back burner. The apartment filled with the smell of something honest cooking. The smell of a Sunday in a house where people had chosen to be.Fabiola came in at eight.He stopped in the entryway. Looked at the kitchen. Looked at me at the stove in my father's old grey cardigan with my hair down and a dish towel over my shoulder."You cooked.""Sit down."He sat. He didn't ask questions. He had learned, in the last three weeks of quiet meals and careful mornings, that some things I did had explanations that would arrive in their own time and some things I did had explanations that would never arrive. The skill of living with me was knowing which was which.I put a plate i

Chapter 34: Telling Fabiola

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

Chapter 35: Fabiola's Silence

Three days.He came out of the study at midnight on the first night. I heard the tap run. The cabinet open. The soft sounds of a man feeding himself in the dark. I didn't get up. I lay in my room with my hand on my stomach and listened to him move through the apartment and back down the hall. The study door closed. The lock didn't turn this time.I didn't know if that was better or worse.The second day he was gone before I woke up.A single rinsed glass on the drying rack. His shoes missing from the entryway. Not his work shoes. The worn brown leather ones he put on when he was not going anywhere that required anything from him. He didn't answer his phone. Didn't text. Didn't call Alvin's office, because I would have known from Lena's face at the morning briefing. Lena's face was the same as always. Professionally neutral. Mildly dissatisfied.He came home at eleven that night.I heard the elevator. His footsteps stopped outside my door. I held my breath. They moved on. The study doo

Chapter 36: My Daughter

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

Chapter 37: Morning Sickness

It started at 5:47 on a Monday morning.Not gently. Not the polite nausea of a woman who simply cannot face coffee. It arrived like an eviction notice. I made it to the bathroom with four seconds to spare and spent the next eleven minutes on the cold tile with my forehead against the cabinet and my father's grey t-shirt twisted in my hands.When it was over I sat up slowly. The bathroom light too bright. The toothpaste smell from the open tube unbearable. I reached up and pushed it behind the hand soap and breathed through my mouth until the second wave passed.Footsteps in the hallway.They stopped outside the door.A pause. Then two quiet knuckles. Polite the way a stranger is polite."Are you all right.""Fine."A longer pause. The footsteps moved to the kitchen. The tap ran. The kettle went on.When I came out twenty minutes later, pale and still holding the wall a little, there was a sleeve of plain crackers on the counter outside the door and a glass of cold water beside it. Fab

Chapter 38: Megan's Joy

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

Chapter 39: Josh's Discovery

The pharmacy was the wrong one.Not the one two blocks from the office. Not the one fourteen miles across the city where nobody knew my face. This was the one on Peachtree. The one I had been careful about. The one where the man at the counter had seen me twice in a month and the third time would be one time too many.I had told myself I would stop coming here. After the shampoo.But the lockbox was almost empty and the nausea had come back Sunday afternoon with a vengeance and it was six blocks from the apartment and I was tired. The yellow yarn on my nightstand had made me feel, for one reckless afternoon, like I was allowed to be ordinary about this.I was not allowed to be ordinary about this.I was in the vitamin aisle when I heard the cart stop behind me.Standing in front of the prenatal section with my hand on the shelf. The box was not subtle. Pale green and gold with a word printed large across the top that no woman buys for any reason except one.The cart stopped.The sound

Chapter 40: The Family Dinner

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

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