Page 44 of Reeves

The words hang between us. My mouth goes dry as understanding blooms, painful and clear. He never knew.

"So you threw it in a drawer and walked away."

"Yes."

One simple word that explains so much. The silence. The years. The life I built without him.

His jaw tightens. He looks past me for a moment, then back, his green eyes almost glowing in the bar's low light.

"The day you left the letter, when I came out of the gym and saw it, I didn't know if I was strong enough to read it. I just thought it was best to leave it be. So I stuffed it in the back of my drawer and forgot about it."

Holy. Fucking. Shit. Does that mean he had no idea about my pregnancy?

I'm at a loss for words. I want to run out of here so fast that my mind erases what it just learned. I want to go back to yesterday when the most stressful thing in my life was whether I should sell my practice or not.

"I convinced myself our relationship was over. Reading your letter would just..." He takes a breath. "Complicate things."

The irony stings so sharply I almost laugh.

"Complicate things," I repeat quietly.

A waiter passes with a tray of drinks. Conversations hum around us. Normal people having normal evenings, while my carefully constructed world trembles.

He never knew. All this time, he never knew.

Reeves finally takes a sip of his bourbon and drains the entire glass. He sets it down carefully, as if he's trying not to make noise, and looks directly into my eyes.

"Did you have the baby?"

The directness of the question leaves nowhere to hide. There's no room for half-truths or deflections.

"Yes." My voice doesn't waver.

He goes completely still.

The bar keeps moving around us. Someone laughs too loudly at the next table. Ice clinks. A server squeezes past. None of it touches what just happened between the two of us.

ELEVEN

Reeves

The Sash:A decorated ribbon worn across the body by the grand marshal as a signal for the crowd to follow.

The word hangs between us.

I don't move.

My hands are flat on the table. My breathing is steady. Six years of training holds the outside of me in place while the inside does something I don't have a name for yet.

A child.

Mine.

The word sits in my chest like a foreign object. I don't know what to do with it. I don't know what it means yet. I only know it's true.

The timeline starts assembling on its own. Six years since I left town, since I shoved that letter into a drawer without opening it and walked away. Six years of deployments, training cycles, and missions that carried me halfway around the world while something else was happening here that I never even considered.

The image comes back with uncomfortable clarity. The kidriding his bike down the street the other day, his little legs pumping hard as his mother encouraged him.