Chapter 5
His building was exactly what I expected and that made it worse. Glass and steel on the outside, quiet concrete lobby on the inside, no dust anywhere. The elevator opened straight into his apartment and the doors slid shut behind us with a soft thud that sounded final. It was bigger than mine, curated in a way that felt staged — gray couch, black kitchen, windows that ran floor to ceiling without curtains, everything lined up. The light was the same bright daylight that had filled my apartment that afternoon, but here it felt colder.
He set his keys down on the kitchen island. The pregnancy test was still in his hand. He looked at it for a second like he didn't know where to put it, then set it down carefully on the counter next to the sink, two pink lines facing up.
"You can sit," he said.
I didn't. I stood just inside the door with my arms crossed over my robe. My feet were bare and the floor was cold.
He moved around me without touching me. He went to the kitchen, opened a cabinet, took out a glass, and filled it with water from the tap. He brought it to me and held it out.
"Drink something," he said. "You haven't."
I took it because my throat was raw from crying. The water was cool. My hand shook a little and he saw it, but he didn't comment. He stepped into the bedroom and came back with a folded throw blanket, a thick cream knit one. He didn't drape it over me. He just held it out.
"You're shivering."
"I wasn't," I said, but I took it. I pulled it around my shoulders. It smelled like his laundry detergent, clean and faintly sharp. The practicality of it — the water, the blanket — felt so strange after the way he'd looked at me on my floor, holding that test like evidence.
"I'm not going to keep standing by your front door all night," I said.
"No," he said. "You don't have to."
He stepped back to give me space and sat down on the edge of the couch, elbows on his knees, hands clasped. He wasn't crowding me anymore. He was trying to be small.
I sat on the other end, perched, the blanket tight around me, the glass in both hands.
For a minute we just breathed. I could hear the traffic ten floors down, faint through the glass.
"Why did you ask me that?" I said finally. My voice was hoarse. "Back at my apartment. 'Whose is this, Anna?'"
He didn't look at me. He stared at his hands.
"Say it," I said. "If you thought something, just say it."
"Anna —"
"Don't do that. You stood over me holding a positive test and asked me whose it was. What did you think I did?"
He exhaled hard through his nose. His jaw was tight.
"I didn't think," he said. "I felt sick. I hadn't been around. You stopped answering. You stopped telling me anything."
"So you filled in the blank yourself."
"I heard you were seeing someone," he said, quiet now, fast, like he'd been holding the sentence for weeks. "Mark told me he saw you at the diner on County Road 9. With that guy from your office. Twice. You were laughing. And you told me you were working late. And then you wouldn't let me come over. For almost a month you wouldn't let me come over. What was I supposed to think?"
The name landed strange. The guy from my office was Daniel and he was married and his wife was pregnant too and we'd been splitting gas station coffee while we waited for the printer to work. Mark, his friend from the league, who always needed a story.
"Daniel?" I said. "You thought it was Daniel's?"
"I didn't know what to think," he said. He finally looked at me, and his eyes were red now too. "You went quiet. You hid this. You hid a test in your bathroom trash and didn't tell me for two weeks — you think I timed that? I did. Two weeks since the date on that box. I checked. So I thought if you could hide that, you could hide anything. And that scared me more than anything else."
I felt my chest tighten. He knew when I'd bought it. He'd looked.
"I wasn't hiding you," I said. "I was hiding me. I didn't know how to tell you because every time I tried to call you last month you said you were busy, or you were out with the team, or you were closing. You weren't here. You left first. I learned to not tell you things because you weren't there to hear them."
He flinched at that. He nodded once, sharp.
"You're right," he said. "I was gone. I was trying to give you space after the fight. I thought space would help. It didn't. It just made me invent things."
He rubbed his face with both hands. The control he'd walked in with — the suit, the crouch, the command — was gone. He just looked tired and young, sitting in his perfect apartment in his black shirt that was now wrinkled.
"I shouldn't have asked it like that," he said. "Whose is this. Like you were on trial. I did that because I was afraid you'd say it wasn't mine. And then I'd have to leave."
I pulled the blanket tighter. The glass of water had warmed in my hands.
"It's yours," I said again, softer this time. "It was always yours."
"I know," he said. His voice cracked. "I knew when you said it. I just — I needed to hear it twice."
We sat there as the light started to fade a little, turning gray at the edges of those big windows. Neither of us moved to turn on a lamp. He didn't tell me to stay, and I didn't say I was leaving. The test sat on the kitchen counter where he'd left it, still there, still positive, no longer held like a weapon.
"You should keep the blanket," he said eventually. "The heat kicks in loud. It'll be cold later."
I nodded. I didn't take off the blanket. I settled back a fraction against the couch.
May you like
"Okay," I said. "I'll stay tonight."
He let out a breath he hadn't seemed to know he was holding and stared down at the floor again, his hands loose now, the doubt named but still sitting heavy between us.
