35. Ava

Chapter 35

Ava

E mily had been right. The first flurries of snow had come, and despite it not sticking, watching as the little, refracting crystals fluttered down from the sky had become my new pastime.

It seemed to be the only thing I was capable of concentrating on.

Hours passed as I sat in the window, eyes locked on each little flurry that drifted lazily down to the earth, swirling in the wind and meeting its fate on the roof of a car or the slightly too-warm sidewalk. Each one seemed to fall in slow motion, fragile and delicate and unknowing of its fate before it either melted or broke apart in the wind. If I were able to get myself together at least a little bit, I'd want to paint them—capture the way the light glinted off of them and turned each one into specks of silver as they reflected the cold exteriors of the skyscrapers around the West Village.

But that idea felt too far away to reach out and grab. Everything did.

In the moments where I couldn't watch the flurries or the moments where the weather died down and there was nothing left to focus on, I found it hard to keep myself from drifting back to every second, every choice I'd made when it came to Adrian. The anxiety that had been coursing through my system for weeks had died down, but not in the way I'd hoped—it took everything else with it. Everything happy, everything sad, everything angry, it was all…gone. I was left with a shell that didn't quite feel anything other than the smallest bit of intrigue over something I'd seen hundreds of times back home in Boston. Those stupid goddamn flurries.

I tried to sit down at my easel after four days had passed without being able to do anything at all. I couldn't decide what colors to use, so I went through the motions of putting a drop of each on my palette board, my body thinking for me and going through each of the steps. But when the time came to actually use my brain and decide what to do first, what paint to dip into first, what stroke to make first, I stalled out, stuck in my chair with a brush in my hand, my eyes glazed over and staring into the middle distance.

I just couldn't do it.

I tried to work, too—tried to sit down on the couch and open my laptop, tried to read the profiles of people Emily had set aside for me. Easy cases, she'd said. To take your mind off things. But all I could focus on was the little file on my desktop screen that had Adrian's full name on it. Page after scanned page of handwritten notes, downloaded profiles of women I'd thought could work, that stupid question that I kept going back to over and over again:

Ideal date? A night at an art museum, finished with a glass of wine on my sailboat.

I felt nauseous just thinking about it. The morning sickness had wound down significantly, but every time my mind drifted back to Adrian and all of those stupid choices, I wondered if it truly had calmed down or if I was just so numb I couldn't feel it until emotions crept back in like a viper.

Emily came over a handful of times in the week that followed my afternoon in Washington Square. She brought me homemade soup and groceries, meal-prepped for me so I wouldn't need to cook for myself, talked to me about how things were going with work to try to take my mind off things.

I just didn't have the energy in me to respond.

"Aves," she said softly, squatting down in front of where I sat curled up on the couch with layers of blankets over me. "You're not taking care of yourself."

"I'm fine." I pulled the blankets up a little higher, covering my arms.

"You're not," she insisted. "And it's okay to not be okay about this. But you're pregnant and you need to take care of yourself to take care of that little life."

I didn't respond. I knew she was right, of course, but I was perfectly happy to sit and stew in peace until I decided I was capable of taking care of myself again.

"Have you talked to your dad?"

I shook my head. The idea of talking to him about the Adrian situation was horrifying on its own, but adding in the pregnancy as well felt like the worst possible thing I could do.

"I think you should," she said gently. "Maybe there's more to this than what Adrian told you."

I couldn't help but wince at the sound of his name.

"For their sake," she pleaded, her eyes drifting to my stomach. "I think understanding would help you to move forward in whatever way that will look for you."

————

I didn't tell him I was coming.

Maybe I should have—maybe that would have made me less anxious about seeing him, maybe it would have made the words I wanted to say to him easier to practice in my mind. Maybe, just maybe, I wouldn't have thundered in like a raging storm, then.

But time was a funny thing and didn't like to be undone.

"Are you happy?"

Dad sat on his recliner, a glass of whiskey in his hand and some show about trucks getting stuck in the snow in Alaska playing too loudly on the absurdly large television. His bald head swung in my direction, wide eyes clashing with mine as I caught him fully off guard.

He kicked down the footrest as his gaze traveled lower, right to the bump I wasn't even trying to conceal. My paint-stained black shirt clung to it, and although my jacket obscured it slightly, I knew damn well he could see it. He couldn't stop seeing it. "Aves…?"

"Do you understand what you've done?"

He blinked rapidly, his body stiffening as he stood up. It was as if his mind couldn't quite catch up to the situation.

I didn't have the patience for him to be confused. I didn't have the patience for anything. "Fucking answer me, Dad," I snapped.

His mouth opened and closed like a goddamn fish. "You're…?"

"Pregnant?" I laughed, the sound coming out angry, hollow, vengeful. "Yeah. What gave it away?"

He shook his head in disbelief, his brows furrowing. "What the fuck is goin' on?"

"You threatened him," I said, kicking the door shut behind me. "You threatened him, and now I'm stuck in limbo because you couldn't wrap your goddamn head around the idea that maybe, just maybe, we weren't just having sex behind your back."

Vertigo hit as he took a step around the coffee table toward me, aiming the remote at the television to pause his precious, stupid show. "Jesus H. Christ, Aves, ‘ya could have told…"

"No," I scolded him. The temptation to laugh at the absurdity of scolding my own father hit me as I gripped the back of the couch for stability, but I fought it. "You should have come to me first instead of Adrian. You know damn well you should have. But you attacked him, threatened him, without ever asking me how I felt about the situation. You didn't even consider me in this at all, did you?"

He cursed under his breath and averted his gaze, exhaling so loud through his nostrils I could hear it from ten feet away. "Is this," he motioned toward my stomach, "why you haven't been at the office?"

My eye twitched. "No, Dad," I said, keeping my voice as level as I could after my outburst. "I haven't been at the office because I've been so fucking depressed over this that I couldn't get out of my apartment."

His jaw tightened. "I didn't realize the extent of it."

"No," I laughed. "You didn't. He hates me now because he thinks I came to you on my own about this when we'd planned to talk to you together, and he won't talk to me because you threatened his entire livelihood if he tried."

I didn't have the guts to say that he was still upset with me for keeping the pregnancy from him, too. That wasn't something Dad needed to know, not right now.

We could have worked through that issue. I was sure of that. But this?

"I should've told him sooner that it wasn't you," he sighed. "I…apologize for not thinking it through."

It was my turn to blink at him in return.

I couldn't remember a single time in my life when Dad had apologized when he was in the wrong. He was always so headstrong in anything he did, any solutions he offered. This was…whiplash inducing.

I cleared my throat to stuff down the surprise. "How did you find out?"

He shook his head, grunting as he fished his phone out of the recliner. "I got an email of some photos," he said, almost cringing. He stepped around the back of the couch toward me, his arm outstretched with his phone screen lit up. "I only looked at the first one. And before ‘ya ask, I've no fuckin' clue who sent ‘em."

Hesitantly, I took his phone.

"I was just tryin' to protect ‘ya," he sighed. "I thought he was using ‘ya, kid. He told me he didn't want somethin' serious after Jan, and then when I got the photos, I was just terrified you'd have to deal with a scandal and heartbreak."

Oh my God.

The email address it came from was just a single string of numbers, and there wasn't a single word in the body of it. Just…photos.

I scrolled.

The first was one of me and Adrian on the balcony at the first charity ball, when he'd followed me outside. My hands were in his hair, my body lifted and pushed against the side of the building, his hips slotted between mine. From the angle, it was clear what was happening, and the whole side of my rear was visible along with his fingers. It looked almost like it had been taken with some sort of long-lens camera—like a paparazzi shot. Surely, neither of us was well known enough to warrant paparazzi.

The second was shot through a foggy window, just two roughly human shapes on the other side of it with one head of black and gray hair and another of bright auburn, his body close to mine against what looked like a…fireplace. That was the Hamptons, on that last night. How the fuck…?

The third was us outside the bagel stand, a car halfway obscuring the photo. His hands were on my cheeks and his mouth was on mine. When he'd told me without telling me that he wanted a relationship.

The fourth showed me that this wasn't in order, but it was the most vulgar one by far, and I had to keep my roiling nausea at bay as best as I could as I realized how deep this invasion of privacy went. It was shot through the large window in his bedroom on his sailboat, with both of us completely bare. My back was arched against his chest, my rear against his hips, his hand around my fucking throat.

I was going to be sick.

I scrolled quickly past the final two: one of him kissing me on the street when I'd followed him to his date that he abandoned, and one of us stepping out of his car in the parking garage below his building, with me in only my buttoned up coat and my hair a mess.

I ran to the bathroom before Dad could say anything else, spilling my guts into the toilet. The phone sat next to me, still illuminated on that last one, taunting me, violating me.

I needed to find out who the fuck had done this, and I needed to tell Adrian. But even as I hurled up the homemade soup, even as I gagged and nothing came up, I wasn't sure if I could forgive him for not believing me.

It wasn't me. It would have never been me.