I think about his face. I can’t predict it. I know this man now in a way I couldn’t have imagined the day I signed thirty-one pages without reading them. I know the controlled version and the kitchen-at-midnight version and the version that stood in my doorway on a rainy night and didn’t move when I told him to leave. I know what he looks like when he’s managing a room and what he looks like when he has forgotten to.
I don’t know what he looks like when the world shifts under him.
I am about to find out.
Saturday morning, early.
Before the suit. Before Roman. Before the day requires anything from either of us. I wash my face, look at myself in the mirror the same way I looked at myself in the coffee shop bathroom, and I go down the corridor.
The walk is shorter than it feels. His light is on under the door, the way it always is before the rest of the building wakes up. I stand outside for a moment, my hand not yet raised to knock, listening to the quiet of the apartment around me, the kitchen where we have had every important conversation sitting silent behind me.
Then I knock twice.
“Come in,” he says.
He’s at his desk. Dark shirt, the city still gray behind him, the morning not yet decided about itself. He looks up. He looks at my face. He puts down what he’s reading before I have crossed the room.
I sit in the chair across from his desk.
I spent two days deciding how to say this. Every careful version I built came apart when I sat down in front of him.
“I’m pregnant,” I say.
The office holds it.
I watch his face.
I can’t read it.
18
ZANE
She’s lookingat me the way she looks at things she cannot predict. I have been watching this woman for long enough to know every register she operates in.
I don’t know what she sees on my face right now.
I don’t know what is on my face right now.
The words land before my brain catches up to them. Four seconds of complete stillness, and what moves through me in those four seconds has nothing to do with strategy or structure or anything I have a practiced response for. It’s simply real. Undeniably, completely real.
I breathe. “How far along?” I say.
“I don’t know exactly. Several weeks.”
I look at her. She looks back. The city behind me is just starting to commit to the morning, the light changing from gray to something less certain.
“Are you alright?” I ask.
“I’m fine.”
“Celine.”
“I’m fine, Zane. I’m not asking you for anything. I’m telling you because you have a right to know.” She holds my gaze. “I haven’t decided anything yet.”
“Neither have I.”
She looks at me for a moment. Then she nods once, the way she nods when a conversation has reached its limit. She stands. Picks up her bag from the floor beside the chair.
