After My Guardian Found Out I’m Carrying His Child

Valeria started showing up on Tuesdays.

Then Thursdays. Then Saturday mornings, when the penthouse was quiet and the light came in soft through the east windows and I used to sit at the kitchen island with my tea and feel like the apartment was mine for a few hours. She would arrive with a bag from the French bakery on 64th — the good one, the one Alexander liked — and she would set it on the counter and smile at me like I was a child who had wandered into the wrong room.

'Morning, sweetie.'

Every time. Sweetie. Like she'd decided on the word and committed to it.

I would smile back. I had gotten very good at smiling.

She asked about my classes with the particular patience of someone who finds the subject beneath them but is performing interest for an audience. How's the thesis coming? Are you sleeping enough? You look tired, sweetie, you really should take better care of yourself. Alexander would be in the living room or on a call, half-listening, and I would watch him not hear any of it. He saw her being kind to me. That was all he saw.

The worst one was a Sunday in October.

I was on the couch with a book when she came in from the hallway, fresh from wherever she'd spent the night, and Alexander was in the kitchen making coffee. She looked at me and then looked at him and said, with a little laugh, 'You know, sometimes I forget she's not actually your little sister.'

Alexander made a sound that wasn't quite agreement and wasn't quite disagreement. He handed her a mug.

I turned a page I hadn't read.

I texted Jazlyn that night. Three words: I need out.

She texted back: On it.

I should have been more specific about what 'on it' meant to Jazlyn Rice.

She showed up two days later with an overnight bag and the energy of someone who had been waiting for permission to detonate. I was in the shower when she arrived. I came out to find her sitting on my bed, legs crossed, expression serene in the way that meant she was planning something.

'You look better,' she said.

'I'm not better.'

'You look better than your texts.' She tilted her head. 'Go dry your hair. I'll make tea.'

I should have known. I should have known from the serenity. Jazlyn was only serene when she had already done the thing.

I was halfway through drying my hair when I heard her call from the other room: 'Hey, where do you keep the — never mind, found it!'

Twenty minutes later, my phone rang. Then the penthouse intercom. Then, distantly, the sound of Alexander's voice from somewhere down the hall, sharp and immediate in a way it almost never was.

I came out of my room to find Jazlyn on the couch, hands folded in her lap, looking at the ceiling with the focused innocence of someone actively not looking at her purse.

Alexander came through the front door four minutes later.

He was still in his dinner clothes — dark suit, tie loosened — and he crossed the room in three strides and put both hands on my face before I could say a word. His thumbs pressed lightly against my cheekbones. He looked at my eyes, then my forehead, then my eyes again.

'What happened.' Not a question.

'Nothing happened,' I said. 'I'm fine. I don't know why —'

'Someone called 911.'

'I'm fine, Alexander.'

He didn't let go of my face. His hands were warm and his expression was doing something I didn't have a name for — not quite fear, not quite relief, something that lived in the space between them. He checked my pulse with two fingers at my wrist, clinical and careful, and I stood there and let him because I didn't know what else to do with my hands.

'Your phone went to voicemail,' he said. 'Three times.'

'It was in my room. I was in the shower.'

'Keep it with you.' His voice had dropped. 'I need to be able to reach you. Do you understand me?'

I nodded. My throat was doing something inconvenient.

He was still holding my face. I don't think he'd noticed. His eyes moved over me again — checking, cataloguing, the way he'd always done, the way that used to make me feel like the most important thing in whatever room we were in. His thumb brushed my cheekbone, just once, almost absent.

'You're sure you're all right.'

'I'm sure.'

From the couch, Jazlyn said nothing. I could feel her not saying it.

The front door opened.

Valeria stood in the entryway with her coat still on and a look on her face that she almost managed to control. Her eyes went to Alexander's hands. To my face inside them. To the distance — or the lack of it — between us.

Alexander stepped back. Unhurried, but he stepped back.

'Valeria.' He turned. 'I'm sorry about dinner. There was a —'

'I can see that,' she said. Her voice was perfectly even. She looked at me and smiled, and it was the same smile she always used, the calibrated one, but something behind it had shifted. Sharpened. 'Everything okay, sweetie?'

'Perfect,' I said. 'Sorry to interrupt your evening.'

Her eyes stayed on me for one second too long.

Alexander was already moving toward her, hand at the small of her back, steering her toward the kitchen, his voice dropping into the low register he used when he was managing a situation. I watched them go.

Jazlyn appeared at my elbow.

'You're welcome,' she whispered.

'I didn't say thank you.'

'You will.' She glanced toward the kitchen. 'Did you see her face?'

I had seen her face. I had also seen Alexander's hands, warm and certain on my skin, and the way he'd looked at me like I was something that could be lost.

I pressed my palm flat against my sternum.

The feeling didn't pass.

It never did.