Alessa did not sleep well that night.
She lay on the modest hotel bed and watched the shadows on the ceiling shift as cars moved through the car park outside, their headlights sweeping briefly across the room before disappearing again. She turned on her side. Then her back. Then her other side. Nothing helped.
Her mind refused to settle.
She kept cycling through the same thoughts. Bryan's face when he saw the papers. Bryan's hand on her arm against the wall. Bryan sitting in that chair looking up at her with something in his eyes she couldn't name. Bryan saying give me time like he was asking for something reasonable.
Time.
She had given him three years.
She pressed her hand flat against her stomach and stared at the wall.
By the morning she had made a quiet decision. She would not make this easy for anyone. Not Bryan, not Lydia, not the Hart family who had looked through her for years like she was scenery. She was carrying a Hart heir and that meant something whether they liked it or not and she was done shrinking herself to make other people comfortable.
She got up, showered, and ordered breakfast for the first time since checking in. She ate most of it, which felt like progress.
She was on her second cup of tea when her phone buzzed with an unknown number.
She almost ignored it.
Something made her open the message instead.
Smart girl. Stay away from that house.
She sat forward and read it again.
Who is this? She typed back.
A friend. Someone who doesn't want to see you hurt more than you already have. You've been through enough.
She stared at the screen.
I don't have anonymous friends. She replied.
You do now. Don't go back to that house Alessa. Lydia is not what she appears to be. And the baby she is carrying? You should ask Bryan when exactly she got pregnant. Ask him to be specific.
Alessa read the message three times slowly.
Her heartbeat was picking up speed.
What are you implying? She typed.
No reply.
She tried calling the number. It didn't connect. She tried again. Same result.
She put the phone down on the table and sat with it, turning the message over in her mind.
Ask him when exactly she got pregnant.
She did the mental calculation without trying to. Bryan had told her Lydia returned two months ago. He said everything happened fast. If she was pregnant now, and they reconnected two months ago, she would have conceived within the first two to three weeks of being back.
Possible. Absolutely possible. People did reckless things in the grip of old feelings she understood that better than most people.
But the message sat inside her chest like a splinter.
She got up and walked to the window and stood there for a long time with her arms wrapped around herself.
She was already broken open. She had nothing left to protect herself with. If she pulled on this thread and it unravelled into something terrible, she didn't know if she had the strength to survive another blow.
But she couldn't leave it alone. That had never been in her nature.
Bryan was not sleeping either.
He was in the guest room of his own house because going into the bedroom where Lydia was sleeping felt wrong in a way he hadn't been able to explain even to himself. He had told her he needed space to think. She had looked at him with those careful eyes of hers and said she understood, which he found irritating in the way that only a very specific kind of understanding could irritate a person.
He stared at the ceiling and turned the evening over in his mind.
You pinned me to a wall.
He had known the moment he did it that it was wrong. He had known it before she even said anything. He had seen the fear flash across her face and somewhere underneath the frustration and the guilt and the desperate need to get those papers signed, something in him had recoiled from himself.
He was not a man who used force. He had never raised his hand to anyone. But desperation had moved through him that night like something foreign, something he barely recognised, and he had taken it out on the one person who had never deserved any of the things he had put her through.
He turned onto his side.
After the baby is born, what happens then?
He hadn't answered because he genuinely did not know. That was the honest truth. He had built his entire vision of the future around Lydia coming back, around undoing the years of a marriage that was never supposed to be his real life. He had not left room in any of that planning for this.
He heard a soft knock at the guest room door.
"Come in." He said.
The door opened and Lydia stood in the doorway in the dim light, a robe wrapped around her.
"You're still awake." She said softly.
"I told you I needed to think." He replied.
She came in anyway and sat on the edge of the bed. She looked at him with an expression that was gentle and open and had always made it so easy for him to believe she understood him.
"I know this is a lot." She said quietly. "I know this complicates things."
"It does." He replied.
"But it doesn't have to change what we planned." She said. "She can be taken care of. The baby too. We can make arrangements that are fair. She doesn't have to be in pain over this and we don't have to lose what we have."
Bryan looked at her.
"She is not a situation to be managed Lydia." He said slowly.
Lydia blinked.
"I didn't say she was." She replied.
"That is what it sounded like." He said.
She held his gaze and for a fraction of a second something moved across her face too fast for him to catch.
She smiled softly.
"Get some sleep." She said and stood up. "We will figure everything out in the morning."
She walked back to the door.
"Lydia." He called.
She paused.
"How far along are you?" He asked.
She turned around with a small smile.
"Eight weeks." She said. "You know this."
"Yes." He said. "I know."
She left and he lay back and looked at the ceiling and thought about the word exactly.