Chapter 4

Thalia called my office four times on Monday.

My assistant, Priya, relayed the messages with the careful neutrality of someone who had learned not to ask questions. Each one was a variation on the same theme. The first was angry. The second was tearful. The third was a threat dressed up as a warning. The fourth was just her name and a callback number, like she'd run out of script.

I deleted all four without listening past the first ten seconds.

She showed up at my building on Wednesday evening. I know because the front desk called up to let me know. I had already spoken to Marcus, the evening concierge, the week before. Politely. Specifically. He understood.

"Ms. Rivera is in the lobby," he said.

"Thank you, Marcus," I said. "Please let her know I'm not available."

A pause. "She says it's urgent."

"It always is," I said. "Thank you."

I hung up and went back to my laptop.

I knew what Thalia wanted. She wanted a fight. She wanted me to scream at her, cry at her, give her something she could push back against. Twenty years of friendship had taught her exactly how to read me, and she was counting on the version of me that still cared enough to engage.

That version had been retired.

The silence was the point. There is nothing more disorienting to a person who has spent their entire life seeking your reaction than the complete withdrawal of it. No anger. No tears. No confrontation. Just a closed door and a front desk that had been briefed.

I let her stand in that lobby for eleven minutes. Then Marcus called back to tell me she had left.

I noted the time in my planner and moved on.

---

The cramping started Tuesday around nine in the evening.

I knew the warning signs by now. A low, dragging ache in my pelvis that built slowly, the way a storm builds — first just pressure, then heat, then the kind of pain that made the edges of my vision go soft and unreliable. I had been through enough cycles to know that fighting it was useless. I took the medication, changed into sweats, and moved from the couch to the bed with the careful deliberateness of someone navigating a minefield.

I did not call anyone.

There was no one to call. Diana knew about the IVF in the broad strokes, the way colleagues know things — enough to be kind, not enough to be useful. My father was in Phoenix. My mother had been gone for twelve years.

Myles had known. In the technical sense. He knew the schedule, the appointments, the clinical vocabulary. What he had never learned to do was stay. The bad nights made him uncomfortable in a way he couldn't articulate, so he stopped trying to, and eventually I stopped expecting him to, and that was how seven years of marriage quietly became a performance of one.

I lay on my side with a pillow pressed against my abdomen and stared at the wall and breathed through it.

The knock came at ten-fifteen.

I didn't move for a moment. I thought about ignoring it. Then I thought about the fact that I was alone in an apartment where the nearest person who knew my name was a doorman two floors down, and I got up.

Kashton was in the hallway.

He had two grocery bags in one hand and a heating pad still in its packaging in the other. He was wearing a dark henley and looked completely unhurried, like showing up at a woman's apartment at ten in the evening with supplies was a thing people did.

"How did you get up here?" I asked.

"Marcus," he said.

I made a mental note to have a second conversation with Marcus.

"I'm fine," I said.

He looked at me. I was in sweats, slightly hunched, holding the doorframe with one hand. He didn't say anything about the gap between what I'd said and what he was looking at.

"I know," he said. "Can I come in?"

I should have said no. I had a plan, and the plan did not include letting Kashton Lawson into my apartment at ten-fifteen on a Tuesday when I was in pain and my defenses were running on fumes.

I stepped back from the door.

---

He didn't ask what was wrong. He didn't ask about the IVF, or the cramping, or why I was alone. He just moved through my kitchen with a quiet efficiency that suggested he had been paying attention to more than I'd realized, and twenty minutes later there was something on the stove that smelled like garlic and broth and warmth.

He set up the heating pad on the bed without commentary. Handed me a glass of water and the medication I'd already taken, which I told him, and he nodded and put it back.

He brought the food in a bowl and sat on the floor beside the bed, back against the nightstand, legs stretched out. He talked. Not about anything that required a response. A story about a contractor who had installed a bathroom fixture upside down and insisted it was intentional. A book he'd been reading that had a terrible ending. The scaffolding collapse on 62nd that had apparently taken out a second cart.

I lay there and listened and ate half the bowl and felt the medication start to work its way through the pain like a slow tide.

At some point I stopped tracking the conversation. I was aware of his voice, low and even in the dark room. I was aware of the heating pad. I was aware that I was not alone, and that the not-being-alone felt different from how it usually felt — not like a performance, not like management. Just presence.

I fell asleep before I meant to.

---

When I woke, the room was gray with early light and the armchair in the corner was empty.

I lay still for a moment. Listened to the apartment. Quiet.

I got up slowly, testing my body. The pain had receded to a dull background hum. Manageable. I walked to the kitchen.

On the counter: a coffee cup. Black. No sugar. Still warm.

I stood there for a long time.

Myles had lived with me for seven years. He had watched me make coffee every morning for seven years. He had never once remembered how I took it without asking.

I picked up the cup. Held it with both hands.

Outside, the city was waking up. Somewhere below, a truck was making a delivery. A siren moved through the distance and faded.

I drank the coffee slowly, standing at the counter, and I did not let myself think about what it meant that my chest felt like something in it had come slightly loose.

I had work to do.

I had a plan.

I put the cup in the sink and went to get dressed.