Sarah Mitchell POV
Sarah sat up so fast the room tilted.
The card was on the floor. She must have dropped it when it hit her. When the name hit her. She stared at it from the bed like it was something that had bitten her, small and white and completely unbothered by the damage it had just done.
Kade Harrison. CEO of Harrison Industries.
She pressed both hands against her face and held them there.
Okay, she told herself. Okay. Think.
She had spent the night with the man she was investigating. She had told him things. Real things. Things about herself that she had not told anyone in two years. She had cried in front of him and laughed with him and let him hold her and she had felt, for the first time in longer than she could remember, like a person someone actually wanted to be near.
And he was Kade Harrison.
The man whose financial records were spread across her desk at home. The man whose CFO was moving money through shell companies. The man at the center of the story that was supposed to save her career.
She got up and got dressed with the fast mechanical efficiency of someone trying to outrun their own thoughts. She did not look at the rumpled sheets. She did not look at the pillow that still held the shape of where he had slept. She picked the card up off the floor because leaving it felt wrong somehow, dropped it in her bag, and walked out of that room without looking back.
In the elevator she stared at her own reflection.
Her hair was a mess. Her eyes were slightly swollen. She looked exactly like a woman who had spent the night somewhere she shouldn't have and was currently experiencing the consequences of that decision at high speed.
The lobby was busy with morning people, business travelers with rolling bags, hotel staff moving efficiently in every direction. Nobody looked at her. Nobody knew. She was just a woman walking through a lobby at eight in the morning, perfectly ordinary, completely falling apart on the inside.
She got outside and the cold air hit her and she stood on the sidewalk and breathed.
The card was in her bag. She could feel it even though that was not physically possible.
She started walking.
She walked for forty minutes without deciding where she was going. Just walked, hands in her pockets, moving through morning Chicago like if she kept moving she could stay ahead of what she was feeling. The city was waking up around her, coffee carts opening, buses running, people with normal Tuesday morning lives doing normal Tuesday morning things.
She bought a coffee from a street cart and drank it standing up and thought about what a journalist was supposed to do in this situation.
A journalist was supposed to keep her personal life completely separate from her professional work. A journalist was supposed to have clear boundaries and clean ethics and absolutely zero romantic involvement with the subject of an active investigation.
A journalist was not supposed to sleep with the CEO she had been trying to expose for two months.
She finished the coffee and kept walking.
The card came out of her bag fourteen times that day. She counted. She would pull it out and look at the name like maybe it would have changed to someone else's name if she just gave it enough time. It never did. Kade Harrison stared back at her in clean black letters every single time, completely unmoved by her feelings about it.
She did not call.
She went home instead. She changed her clothes. She sat at her desk and opened the Harrison Industries folder and stared at all her research and felt sick. Not because of the story. Because of last night. Because she had sat in a hotel bar and told a stranger her deepest fears and he had listened like it mattered to him, and all the while he was the person at the center of her investigation.
And the worst part, the part she kept circling back to no matter how many times she tried to move away from it, was that he hadn't felt like a corrupt CEO. He had felt like a man who was just as lost as she was.
That didn't mean anything. She knew that. Feeling real and being good were not the same thing. She had believed a source once because he felt honest and look how that had ended.
She closed the folder.
She needed to think clearly and she couldn't think clearly while looking at his name in her own handwriting for the thirty-seventh time today.
She made dinner. Rice and vegetables, the cheap kind that she made when she wasn't really thinking about food. She ate standing at the kitchen counter because sitting down at the table felt too formal for how chaotic the inside of her head was. She watched the evening news on her phone while she ate and she did not let herself check if Harrison Industries was mentioned.
It wasn't. Whatever was happening inside that company was still hidden enough to stay off the evening news. For now.
After dinner she cleaned the kitchen with the thoroughness of someone who needed to control at least one small thing. She washed the single bowl and the single pan and dried them both and put them back exactly where they belonged.
Then she stood at her kitchen counter and realized something.
Her period was late.
Not today late. Not yesterday late. She had been so deep in the investigation, so run down, so focused on everything except her own body that she had not noticed. She counted backward in her head. Not a day late. Not two days late.
A week.
She stood very still.
It could be stress. It was definitely stress. She had been operating on four hours of sleep and coffee and anxiety for weeks and her body had every reason in the world to be irregular right now. This was not a situation. This was stress. Stress did this. Everyone knew stress did this.
She put her shoes back on.
The convenience store two blocks from her apartment was bright and quiet at nine PM. She walked straight to the right aisle without stopping because she had been there before and she knew where everything was and she was not going to stand in the middle of the aisle and deliberate about this like it was a decision that required deliberation.
She bought two tests. Not one. Two, because one result was a possibility and two results were closer to a fact and Sarah Mitchell had spent her entire career understanding the difference between those two things.
She went home. She went to the bathroom. She followed the instructions with the same focus she brought to financial reports and source verification and every other thing she did when she needed results she could trust.
Then she set both tests on the edge of the sink and sat down on the bathroom floor with her back against the wall and waited.
She looked at the card in her hand. She didn't remember taking it out of her bag but it was there, Kade Harrison's name face up in the bathroom light.
She thought about last night. About the way he had listened. About afraid of what he might find. About two people in a quiet bar both holding themselves together with whatever they had left.
She thought about the folder on her desk. About Marcus Webb. About shell companies and suspicious transfers and a woman who left a coffee shop without touching her drink because she was too scared to say more than a single name out loud.
She thought about James. Four months, Mitchell.
The timer on her phone went off.
She looked at the tests.
Both of them.
Two pink lines. Each one clear and dark and completely certain of itself.
Sarah's hand dropped into her lap.
The bathroom was very quiet. The card was still in her other hand. She looked at the name on it and the full weight of the situation settled over her like something physical, heavy and real and impossible to argue with.
She was pregnant.
The father was Kade Harrison.
The man she was investigating for financial fraud.
The man whose company she had four months to expose or lose her career completely.
She sat on that bathroom floor for a long time and let the enormity of it sit with her. The two tests on the edge of the sink. The business card in her hand. The folder on her desk in the next room with his name circled in red.
This was not a problem she could research her way out of.
This was not something that got better if she worked harder or stayed up later or pushed through.
This was a person. Growing inside her. Half her. Half him. Already real in a way that nothing in her life had been real for a very long time.
She looked at the card one more time.
She thought about what he had told her in the dark. I'd ask more questions earlier. Someone I trusted told me everything was fine and I chose to believe it because digging meant potentially finding something I'd have to deal with.
Sarah closed her fingers around the card.
She was going to have to deal with this.
Tomorrow morning. First thing.
She was going to walk into Harrison Industries and tell Kade Harrison that she was pregnant with his baby and that she was also the journalist trying to bring his company down.
She pressed her back harder against the bathroom wall and looked at the ceiling.
"Okay," she said out loud to nobody. "Okay."
Neither of the tests changed their answer.