Chapter 174: Chapter 174
Aria pov
I went very still as realization suddenly hit me, my mind moving backwards without permission, connecting things I hadn’t thought to connect.
The exhaustion during the lockdown. I had blamed stress and fear and the particular weight of living under threat. But I had slept deeply and heavily and unusually, in a way that stress had never produced in me before. Stress kept me awake but this had pulled me under.
I set my tea down slowly. The week before the shooting. I had been turned on constantly, unreasonably, in a way that had no rational explanation. I had blamed Damien’s proximity. The enforced closeness of the lockdown. The tension of everything Marcus represented and the way danger had always made the two of us reach for each other. I had made myself believe all of that.
My period. Irregular since I was a teenager, arriving when it felt like it and disappearing for months at a time without explanation. I had learned not to read anything into its absence. So when it hadn’t come after the merger celebration I had filed it away without a second thought and moved on entirely.
The merger celebration. I counted backwards carefully, sitting at the kitchen counter in the grey morning quiet.
Eight weeks, maybe nine as I sat with that number for a moment.
Then I stood up, went to the bathroom, looked at myself in the mirror for a long moment, and made a decision.
********
The pharmacy two blocks from the building opened at six. I was there at six-o-two in sunglasses and a coat pulled over my robe, hair wrapped, moving quickly through the quiet morning streets. The woman at the counter didn’t look twice at me. I paid in cash and walked back with the paper bag held against my side and let myself back into the penthouse before anyone had arrived.
Olivia was due at seven-thirty, which means I had time.
I went to the bathroom and locked the door and sat on the edge of the tub and opened the bag and looked at the box for a moment. Then I read the instructions I already knew — three minutes, two lines, simple — and did what needed to be done and set the test face down on the tile and sat back against the door and waited.
Three minutes had never taken so long in my life. I looked at the ceiling. I thought about nothing while at the same time I thought about everything. I thought about the merger celebration, the way he had looked at me across the party, the drive home, the elevator, the bedroom, the way he had fucked me with intensity that night.
The timer on my phone went off.
I looked down.
Two lines.
I sat there on the bathroom floor of our penthouse in my wedding robe and I looked at those two lines and I felt something move through me.
I had done this before. Alone, in a different bathroom, in a different life, when everything was falling apart around me and the two lines meant loss and danger and an uncertain road stretching ahead with no one beside me.
This was not that.
This was our penthouse. This was our wedding morning. Damien was in a hotel suite, probably already awake, probably already doing something logistical, and in two hours I was going to walk toward him in a dress I had chosen myself and marry him in front of every person we have invited.
I sat with that for a long moment. Then I stood up.
I wrapped the test carefully in tissue and tucked it into my bag. I washed my hands and looked at myself in the mirror.
"You are getting married in a few hours," I told my reflection quietly. "Everything else waits."
I unlocked the bathroom door and went to finish getting ready.
When Olivia arrived at seven-thirty with coffee and her dress over her arm and her hair already half done, I was sitting at the vanity in my robe with my makeup half finished and the test sitting in my bag two feet away and I smiled at her in the mirror and said "you’re late" and she said "I am exactly on time, you’re just anxious" and I laughed and let her take over and said nothing.
I carried it through the hair and the makeup and the dress. I carried it through Olivia pronouncing me radiant and through Noah in his small formal suit standing in the doorway with his ring box clutched in both hands saying "Mama you look very nice". I carried it through the rooftop doors opening and the music changing and the first moment I saw Damien standing at the front going absolutely to pieces at the sight of me.
I carried it through the vows. I carried it through the ring sliding onto my finger and his voice saying "I do" like it was the most certain thing he had ever said.
I had been carrying it all day, waiting for exactly the right moment, and now he was standing in front of me at our reception with his hand in mine telling me he could see something in my face and asking what I was waiting to say.
I took his hand and pressed it flat against my stomach.
He didn’t move for a full second. Then his eyes dropped to where his hand rested and came slowly back up to my face, and whatever composure he had been maintaining quietly dissolved.
"Aria." His voice came out rough and low. "Are you "
"I found out this morning," I said.
He didn’t say anything else instead pulled me in, both arms around me, one hand still pressed flat against my stomach between us, and held on with a completeness that made it hard to breathe, and I let him, because I was crying again and laughing slightly at myself for crying again, and he was shaking slightly too though he would probably deny it later.
"Again," he said against my hair.
"Again," I confirmed.
When we pulled apart, his eyes were wet and he wasn’t doing anything about it, and I loved him ferociously for that — for learning to just let it show. "We’re telling them," he said.
"We’re telling them," I agreed.
He held my hand, turned to the room, and said simply: "We have one more thing."
The reception quieted. I watched it move through our twenty-six people — the understanding, then the warmth, then Olivia’s sharp inhale from across the room as she looked at me with wide eyes, and I gave her a small nod, and she pressed both hands over her mouth for the second time in minutes.
Noah looked up from his cake plate. "Mama," he called across the rooftop, with complete conversational ease. "Are you crying again?"
"Yes, bug."
He thought about this. "Is it a happy cry?"
"Very happy."
He returned to his cake with a small nod, apparently satisfied.
Damien crouched down to his level then, one knee on the rooftop tile, and pulled Noah slightly aside in the way he did when he had something important to say just between them. I watched him cup the back of Noah’s head gently and say something quiet into his ear, something I couldn’t hear over the reception noise.
Noah pulled back and looked at his father with very wide eyes.
Damien nodded once, slowly, with the solemn gravity of a man who had just shared classified information with a four year old and was trusting him completely with it.
This was, I would reflect later, a catastrophic miscalculation.
Noah turned to face the reception. Drew a full breath into his entire small body. "A BABY," he announced, to the city at large. "WE ARE GETTING A BABY."
The entire reception erupted — laughter, warmth, someone’s champagne glass going up, Olivia making a sound across the room that was half scream half sob, Lucas catching her before she spilled her drink.
I looked at Damien. He was still crouched at Noah’s level, pinching the bridge of his nose, shoulders shaking with something that was either devastation or laughter and appeared to be both simultaneously.
"You told him to keep it quiet didn’t you," I said.
He looked up at me. "I told him it was a secret just for us."
"And what exactly did you think would happen."
He had no answer for that. Noah, entirely satisfied with the reception his announcement had received, climbed back onto his chair and returned to his cake with the energy of a man who had discharged an important duty.
The first dance came as the sky deepened to indigo above us, the string lights doing their work, the music something slow and real that Damien had chosen and wouldn’t tell me about until tonight.
He drew me in properly — hand at my waist, my hand in his, the formal hold that still felt intimate because of who was inside it — and we moved together in the easy way that had taken time to learn, bodies that had figured out how to trust each other.
"You could have told me before," he said, quiet under the music.
"I know." I met his eyes. "I wanted to tell you here. I wanted it to be part of this."
