Home / Romance / PREGNANT BY THE CEO / Chapter 81 - Chapter 90

All Chapters of PREGNANT BY THE CEO: Chapter 81 - Chapter 90

90 Chapters

CHAPTER 81- THE NEXT SIXTEEN YEARS

Isla gave us three minutes on Sunday morning and then announced she needed a ride. Sebastian stood without being asked and Isla gave him the two-second assessment she gave everything that mattered. "Fine," she said. "But I pick the music." "Absolutely not," he said. She smiled, the fast, real one then went for her coat.I watched them leave and thought about Marcus. He walked into my office on Thursday, sat down, asked Sebastian one question, ate his lunch, and left saying he would raise the rest by email. He had not raised anything by email. He was waiting for the right setting, on his own terms. I knew this because I knew Marcus Webb for six years and I understood how he moved toward things that mattered to him.I texted him Sunday afternoon.Text: Be here Friday night, for dinner.His reply came in four minutes.Text: Is this an invitation or a summons?Me: Both,Him: Fine, I'll bring the good wine. This warrants it.Friday arrived ordinary on the outside and weighted on the insi

CHAPTER 82- THE WHOLE VERSION

He said he stopped being careful about saying it and I sat with those words for the rest of the evening and most of the next morning. He did not push for a response.That was the thing. He said it, went back to his wine, and we talked about smaller things for another hour and he did not once look at me waiting. He simply said what was true and returned to the ordinary business of being present, which was itself a kind of answer about who he was now.I drove home thinking about it. Not anxiously, the anxious version of this was a year ago. This was different, sitting with something large and being honest about it.I loved him.I knew that for longer than I had said it directly, even inside my own head. It had been there underneath Tuesday dinners and Saturday mornings and the corridor at ten-thirty and the terrace at sunset. Underneath all of it, the whole time, the same feeling it had always been, just finally somewhere it did not have to hide.The question was not whether I felt it

CHAPTER 83- WE

Sebastian texted Isla the morning after she told me. I saw it over her shoulder, she left her phone face up on the table, which she rarely did, which meant she had been waiting. His message: “Saturday. What time?” No three question marks or any over-explanation. Just the direct question of a man who had been told he was wanted somewhere and was finding out when. Isla texted back, put the phone face down, went back to her cereal.Like nothing significant had happened. Saturday arrived and Sebastian was wearing a jacket. He always wore a jacket to things that mattered. Isla came out of her room composed and ready. She looked at him, then looked at the jacket."Looking good," she said. "You dressed for it.""It's a showcase," he said. "Of course I dressed for it.""A lot of parents don't," she said."Well…I'm not a lot of parents," he said.She considered this with the expression she used when someone had said something accurate. "No," she said. "You're not." She picked up her bag. "

CHAPTER 84- WHAT WAS TRUE

The drive home from the showcase was quietly warm. Isla was in the back seat telling Sebastian about a disagreement with a classmate, not angry, just precise, the way she was precise about things she thought deserved precision. Sebastian asked clarifying questions that were actually clarifying. I drove and listened and thought: this is what the ordinary version looks like, not the carefully managed version. The actual one.We had dinner at my apartment afterward. Jade and Marcus stayed, the table got loud. Isla held court about the showcase with the satisfaction of someone who had done something well and was allowing herself to know it. Marcus made a toast that was embarrassingly sincere. Jade cried and denied it. Sebastian sat next to me and at some point his hand was near mine on the table and neither of us moved away from it. I did not overthink what that meant. I just let it be whatever it was.The weeks that followed moved with the warmth of a life being properly lived. Sebasti

CHAPTER 85- THE WHOLE VERSION

I called Jade in the evening because I had been circling a conversation with my sister for months and Ethan's call reminded me that the right time to say true things was when you were ready. Not when conditions were perfect.She answered on the second ring. "Hey Sissy, what's up?""Nothing much I want to talk,” I said. A pause. "Oo...kaayy…talk about what?""Mum," I said.She was silent. Then, quietly, "Do you want me to come over?""Yes please," I said.She arrived forty minutes later with wine she did not open and the energy of someone who had been waiting for a conversation for a long time and was both ready and not ready for it to start.Isla was in her room. We sat at the kitchen table. Jade put the wine on the counter, sat across from me, folded her hands, and looked at me with the sharp warm eyes were reading me since she was old enough to read anything."Tell me," she said.I told her, not everything, she knew most of it. But the parts I had processed properly now that I had

CHAPTER 86- FACE UP

Something shifted after that conversation. Not dramatically, the quiet shift of a person who has been given honest feedback by someone who loves them and has decided to actually take it.I stopped managing Jade. Not with a formal decision or a conversation about it. I just stopped editing what I told her before I said it. Stopped calculating what she could handle. Stopped treating my twenty-four-year-old sister like she needed protection from the full version of my life.She noticed immediately. The first Friday dinner she came to, not because something significant was happening, just because it was Friday and she was invited, she arrived with wine and an opinion about the menu before she had taken her coat off."You said pasta," she said. "I assumed something substantial.""There's salad," I said."Naomi," she said."And bread of course" I said.She looked at Isla. "She got distracted." Said Isla. Jade went to the refrigerator with the ease of someone who knew where things were.

CHAPTER 87- I THOUGHT YOU MIGHT

He framed the photograph we had been keeping face down for sixteen years and I let him hang it somewhere I could see it because he was right. It was a good photograph.He put it in the hallway. Not the bedroom… the hallway, where I would pass it every morning on my way to the kitchen and every evening on my way back. He held it against the wall and said: "Here?" and I had said yes without thinking about it because it was exactly right.The first morning I walked past it I stopped. Just for a moment. Long enough to look at it directly, then I went to make coffee. Not with grief, not with the careful management of feeling. Just looked at it and moved on.That was what it looked like when you stopped keeping things face down. That was what it looked like when you decided the past was something to have, not something to hide from.The weeks that followed moved with the quiet momentum of a life in its right shape. I signed the bigger office lease on a Tuesday.The one I had been circling f

CHAPTER 88- COME STRAIGHT HOME

He said it changes everything in a national profile and I read it at my desk at eight in the morning.Marcus sent it first, no message, just the link at seven fifty-two, which meant he'd been awake and reading the business press before eight on a Thursday and had thought of me immediately. I read the piece through properly. Then I read the paragraph again. I put my phone down and made coffee, came back and read the paragraph a third time. ‘I stopped making decisions based on what I was afraid of losing. I started making them based on what I actually wanted. It changes everything.’Said off the record. Printed anyway, because the journalist understood it was the most true thing in the piece and the piece needed it. Jade sent it at eight-oh-three: “He said that. In a national publication. Under his own name. I need you to appreciate how significant that is for a man like him.” She said,Priya sent it at eight-eleven with: “Good.”I sat at my desk and thought about a man who spent thirty

CHAPTER 89- ALREADY OKAY

My daughter had the spine of a woman who rebuilt herself and the eyes of a man learning to be worthy of her got in on her own merit and her own words.I was undone, I got home before Isla did. I bought food on the way — not just pasta, something substantial, the kind of dinner this night deserved. I was standing at the counter unpacking it when I picked up my phone.I had been planning to call Jade. Instead Sebastian was already picking up and I had not planned to do it and I was not going to examine why I had."Hey," he said."Isla got in," I said."What?" he said."The programme," I said. "She got accepted. They specifically mentioned the essay."What came out of him then was not a word. Not any language. Just sound, the pure, unguarded sound of a man receiving something that went deeper than words could reach first.I stood at my kitchen counter and listened to it and thought: ‘This is what he would have been like from the beginning. If we had been allowed to have it. This version

CHAPTER 90- JUST NOT TONIGHT

The evening wound down the way good evenings did, people peeling away in the natural order.Isla went first and hugged Sebastian on her way to her room. Not the careful, side-on hug of someone still testing new territory. A full, easy hug, arms around his neck, cheek pressed briefly to his shoulder the way she used to when she was still small. She said goodnight in that soft private voice she used when she was happy, then disappeared down the hall. Her door clicked shut. The apartment grew quieter by one person’s worth of presence. Jade and Marcus left together. This had been happening more often, the two of them ending up at the door at the same time, the dinner bickering continuing into the corridor in lower voices. I let it be whatever it was.Jade hugged me with her warmth of someone who had a good evening and wanted to show appreciation. Her perfume, citrus and clean, pulled me back for a second to other kitchens, other years.“This was a beautiful night sis,” she said against

...

4 5 6 7 8 9

SCAN CODE TO READ ON APP