Chapter 338

[ 1,190 words ]

Katia’s POV

The nausea hit somewhere between the second cup of coffee I couldn’t bring myself to finish and the quarterly numbers I’d been staring at for twenty minutes without absorbing a single figure on the page.

I set my pen down and pressed the back of my hand against my mouth, breathing slowly through my nose the way I’d been doing for the better part of two weeks now, waiting for the wave to pass the way it always eventually did, except lately it didn’t pass so much as it retreated, temporarily, biding its time until the next meal, the next smell, or the next ordinary moment it decided to ruin.

I knew these signs.

I had spent the better part of my career trusting my own body’s signals before anyone else’s reports, trusting instinct the way other executives trusted spreadsheets, and right now every instinct I had was telling me the same thing it had been telling me for two weeks, quietly, patiently, waiting for me to stop arguing with it.

I had been telling myself a different story for two weeks, the same way I’d told myself a different story after the Maldives, after the wine I couldn’t finish, and after the coffee that started tasting wrong overnight like someone had switched the brand without telling me. Stress, I told myself. The dinner. Delia. Jude and Hailey are flying in from London and unraveling an entire family in one evening. Anyone’s body would rebel against a month like the one I’d just had.

But stress didn’t explain two weeks. Stress didn’t explain the way certain smells now turned my stomach from across a room, or the exhaustion that sat behind my eyes by two in the afternoon no matter how much sleep I’d gotten the night before, or the tenderness I’d noticed in the shower that morning and immediately decided not to think about until I absolutely had to.

I thought about the way Sam had looked at me twice this week with something close to concern, quickly tucked away before I could call her on it. I thought about the dress that hadn’t zipped quite right yesterday morning, the one I’d blamed on the dry cleaner instead of looking at the actual mirror for longer than three seconds.

Sam had left for lunch twenty minutes ago. The office was quiet except for the hum of the air conditioning and the distant sound of someone’s phone ringing two desks over, unanswered, eventually going silent. I opened the bottom drawer of my desk, the one I kept locked, and pulled out the small paper bag I’d bought three days ago on my way home and hadn’t been able to bring myself to open since.

I had told myself I was being paranoid. I had told myself a dozen other explanations, each one thinner than the last, each one easier to believe in the daylight than the truth I’d been circling for two weeks without ever once saying it out loud, not even to myself, not even in the privacy of my own head where nobody else could hear how frightened I actually was.

I carried the bag into my private bathroom and locked the door behind me, even though there was no one else on this floor who would have walked in, even though Sam knew better than anyone alive not to interrupt me without knocking first. I locked it anyway. Some habits weren’t really about the people around you. Some habits were about needing one small thing in your control before you did something that might take all the rest of it away.

The fluorescent light overhead buzzed faintly, the only sound besides my own breathing, and I set the bag down on the counter and stared at it for a long moment before I made myself move, the way I’d stared down boardrooms and hostile takeovers and men twice my age who underestimated me on principle, except none of those rooms had ever made my hands shake the way this small tiled one did now.

My hands were not steady when I opened the box.

I read the instructions twice, even though I already knew how this worked, even though I’d watched enough films and overheard enough conversations over the years to understand exactly what I was supposed to do, because reading the instructions gave me something to focus on besides the sound of my own heartbeat, loud and uneven in my ears, the only sound in the small tiled room besides the tap I’d left running out of some instinct toward normalcy.

I thought, absurdly, of every woman who had ever stood in a bathroom exactly like this, in offices exactly like mine, holding a future in her own two hands and trying to decide whether to be afraid of it before she even knew what shape it would take. I had built an entire company on the idea that I made decisions quickly, decisively, and without flinching. I had never once built a strategy for this.

I sat there afterward with the stick resting on a folded square of tissue on the counter, and I made myself look at my reflection instead of the timer counting down on my phone, because if I looked at my own face for the next three minutes, I would not have to watch the small white window where my entire future was quietly deciding itself without asking my permission.

Three weeks ago my sister had stood in my living room and learned, in front of our entire family, exactly what her husband had been doing with his nights. I had thought the worst of it was already behind us, that whatever came next would be lawyers and headlines and the slow, manageable work of a family rebuilding itself in private. I had not accounted for this.

Julian didn’t know.

There was no question of whose child this was. There was only the question of how I was going to tell him.

My phone buzzed against the counter, the timer finally reaching zero, and I realized I had been holding my breath without noticing, my hand pressed flat against my stomach in a gesture I hadn’t consciously chosen and couldn’t seem to stop.

Somewhere down the hall, my office phone was ringing again, the same unanswered line from earlier, insistent now, and I had no idea who was calling or what they wanted, only that whatever it was would have to wait. The entire world could wait another minute. It had no idea yet that it needed to.

I looked down.

Two lines.

Clear, pink, unmistakable, sitting in that small plastic window like a verdict nobody had asked me to deliver. For a long moment I didn’t move at all, didn’t breathe, just stood there in the small tiled room listening to the tap running and the faint hum of the building around me, a woman who had spent the last month exposing every lie in her family one dinner at a time, finally face to face with the one truth she had no idea yet how to survive.

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