30. Adrian

Chapter 30

Adrian

T his tux was too fucking tight. The lights were too bright. The room was too small, and the sounds were too loud.

If I was anywhere other than a hospital, I might have been concerned that I'd go into cardiac arrest and die on the fucking spot.

The woman who'd entered the little square of space Ava had been given turned on her heel. "I'll, uh, be back in a minute."

She disappeared.

"Adrian," Ava whispered.

"You're pregnant." The words felt hollow, like they didn't exist even though I'd spoken them. They felt cheap. They felt baseless, absurd —she was on birth control. I'd checked.

"I wanted…I wanted to figure out how to tell you," she said, her voice breaking. I watched her like a hawk, watched as the tears welled up in her eyes. Anxiety brewed in me, swelled, broke, crashed. I couldn't for one second tell if I was elated or disturbed. "You've been dealing with so much and I didn't want to make it worse."

"How did this happen?" I asked. It felt as if I was being piloted on a course I didn't select. I couldn't even remember deciding to ask that.

"I have no idea," she said, her knees pulling up to her chest beneath the thin blanket. "I'm never late with the pill."

"How far along?"

"Eleven weeks."

Eleven weeks. So…almost three months.

"I'm so sorry," she said again, her hand squeezing mine. But I didn't know what to say to that.

This felt like a blessing and a curse, like a violation of trust and a shot in the fucking head. "How long have you known?"

"Three weeks," she croaked. "Please don't hate me, Adrian."

I rested my forehead against our joined hands, trying to make sense of this. Three weeks—she'd had a stomach bug three weeks ago. Was that real? Or was that morning sickness? When she'd turned up at my house four days ago, she'd known. She'd refused a drink. She'd left before anything else could happen. Was she showing? I hadn't even been looking, hadn't been paying attention when she was naked in my shower with her body up against mine, hadn't thought to look while she was sobbing into me because why would I? I'd just wanted to help her. I'd just wanted to fix her problem, but knowing what that problem was now was more overwhelming than I could have imagined.

She'd kept this from me.

For three weeks.

"I don't hate you," I breathed. "I just don't understand why you've done this."

She sniffled as a tear broke free, streaking down her cheek and taking a line of makeup along with it. "I found out the day after you told me you wanted to slow things down," she said. Her voice broke as she spoke, her throat visibly tightening. "I panicked. You've been doing so much at work and trying to make time for Lucas. I didn't want to add to the stress so I've been trying to figure out the right way to do it. I'm sorry, Adrian."

She wiped at her eyes with the base of her palms.

"I'm just so fucking sorry."

The woman slipped back into the room with a cart and a clear, hanging bag, her eyes warily darting between both of us. She unhooked the clipboard from under her arm and slowly approached Ava, hesitating slightly as she reached for our joined hands. "Sorry," she said. "I'm going to get a drip going just in case."

Ava clung on.

Slowly, painstakingly, I loosened my grip and slid my fingers out from between hers.

The woman got to work connecting her to the IV drip despite Ava's sniffled objections, but Ava barely watched her, barely paid attention to her incessant questions about how far along she was, the date of her last period, and the symptoms she'd had so far. She gave the woman one-word answers where she could.

Instead, she kept her attention on me, glassy, tear-filled eyes watching every microscopic movement I made. The heaviness of it, the chaos behind it, struck me in a way I hadn't felt in two years.

Betrayal.

I swallowed down what felt like a mouthful of sand. "I need to make some calls," I said softly, gripping the arms of the far too uncomfortable chair. Her eyes widened, her mouth opened, and the heart rate monitor beeped faster behind her. Sighing, I added, "Not to your father."

Her lips locked as she nodded. I couldn't tell if it was aimed at me or was more of a self-soothing gesture, but it made my chest ache.

"Will you be moving her any time soon…?" I asked, turning my head to the woman in scrubs.

"Ashley," she grinned. "She'll probably stay here for another thirty minutes to an hour. We need to run some blood tests. But if you give me your number, I can call you if she gets moved early."

Ava's heart rate spiked again, filling the little area with louder, quicker beeps. I tried not to think about it. "I don't have my phone on me. I was hoping I could use one of the ones here."

"Oh," Ashely said, her smile faltering for just a moment. "There's one on the wall a few cubicles down. You're welcome to use that. Just dial nine to get out."

I nodded my thanks. "I'll be back in a few, Aves."

————

The air in my lungs felt too heavy to exhale, like I was holding in the smoke from a cigarette or had stood too close to a fire. No amount of internal reflection seemed to fix that, no matter how long I stood there looking at the closed curtain that Ava sat behind.

I'd called Grace, warned her that I wouldn't be home until late and asked her to put Lucas to bed for me, asked her to stay until I could get home. I'd called Michael, warned him that I was no longer at the event and given him as brief of a rundown as I could. And I'd resisted every urge to call David and tell him his daughter was in the hospital.

Because she was right. If he came down here, he'd find out she was pregnant. That on its own would spark questions.

So as I stood in the hallway of the triage area of the emergency department, leaned up against a wall with the hardest parts of my palms pressing into my eyes to relieve some of the overwhelming pressure in my skull, all I could do was think.

Think about what this meant.

Think about what she'd done.

Think about how fucking horrible it felt.

There was a part of me, of course, that was thrilled. That part of me was bursting beneath the pressure of the rest of it, though—all of the bad was smothering it, stamping it down, burning it, digging it a grave twenty feet beneath the surface of the earth and filling it with concrete.

Because more than anything, this brought me back to the lowest point I'd ever been at.

It felt as if Jan had clawed her way out of the ground and wrapped her manicured, white-tipped nails around my ankles. Like she'd dug them in and drawn blood for the first time in a year. Like she was screaming my name as if it were her dying breath, like her mangled body was in front of me on that cold, metal table again, like I was searching the small bit of skin they'd let me see in search of her tattoo of Lucas' name. Like I was identifying her, giving her back her name, breathing life into a lifeless corpse that would only hurt me days later.

Jan hadn't been honest with me. I'd given her every ounce of my trust, and she'd crushed it under the heel of her leather boots that still sat in the back of my closet.

And Ava—someone I'd opened myself up to, someone I'd risked shattering myself over, someone I'd thought was worth letting inside of my head and my heart and my life despite feeling unwaveringly sure in my decision to never do that again—had kept this from me.

She hadn't been honest.

She'd made me break the one rule between Lucas and me. And if she could do that for three weeks, could she genuinely fit into our family dynamic? Could I trust her to?

The twisting in my stomach made me worry that I couldn't.

But the sounds of quiet sobs behind the curtain begged me to.