After My Guardian Found Out I’m Carrying His Child

The morning sickness started on a Tuesday.

I thought it was stress. I thought it was the move, the boxes, the four flights of stairs, the way my whole life had been rearranged in the span of a week. I made tea and sat by the window and told myself I was fine.

Wednesday I threw up twice before nine a.m.

Thursday I couldn't keep water down.

By Friday I was on my knees on the bathroom tile, hair in my fist, staring at the grout lines my mother had probably stared at twenty years ago, and I knew. I knew the way you know things you've been refusing to know — all at once, like a door swinging open that you'd been leaning against with your whole body.

I bought the test at the pharmacy two blocks over. Then I went back and bought two more.

I sat on the bathroom floor and looked at all three of them lined up on the edge of the tub.

Blue lines. Every one.

The apartment was very quiet. Outside, someone was playing music from a car window, something with bass that thumped through the walls and then faded. A pigeon landed on the fire escape and left.

I pressed my back against the cabinet under the sink and pulled my knees to my chest and sat there for a long time.

Alexander Knight's child.

The man who didn't know he'd touched me. The man who was, right now, probably in his penthouse with Valeria's coffee mug on his counter and Valeria's coat on his chair and no idea that the girl he'd raised had left something behind when she walked out his door.

I thought about his face at my graduation. That unguarded look. I thought about the first edition on the restaurant table and the way he'd said *you earned it* like it was simple, like I was simple, like I was still just his ward and he was still just doing his job.

I picked up my phone and called Jazlyn.

She screamed so loud the upstairs neighbor banged on the floor.

---

She was at my door in forty minutes, slightly out of breath, with a tote bag that clinked.

'I brought wine,' she said, 'and then I remembered you can't have wine, so I brought sparkling water and also I have a plan.'

'I don't want a plan.'

'Evie —'

'Come in.'

We sat on the kitchen floor because the couch wasn't assembled yet. Jazlyn laid out her plan with the focused energy of someone who had been rehearsing it on the subway. It involved telling Alexander. It involved telling him soon, directly, in person, before Valeria could cement anything further.

I said no.

She presented a revised version. This one involved telling Marcus Webb first, letting him broker the conversation.

I said no.

A third version. An anonymous letter. 'Very dramatic,' she said. 'Very you.'

'Absolutely not.'

We went back and forth for three hours. Jazlyn was relentless in the specific way of someone who loves you and cannot stand watching you make a decision she considers catastrophic. She sat across from me on the kitchen floor and made every argument I had already made to myself at two in the morning, and she made them better, and I sat there and listened and felt the weight of each one and said no anyway.

Finally she stopped.

'Give me one reason,' she said. 'One real reason.'

I looked at my hands.

'He's happy,' I said. 'I'm not going to be the reason he isn't.'

The kitchen was quiet.

Jazlyn looked at me for a long moment. Her jaw worked. She pressed her lips together and looked at the ceiling and I could see her deciding not to say the thing she wanted to say.

She stood up and grabbed her tote bag.

'You're wrong,' she said. 'And I love you. And you're wrong.'

She left. I heard her footsteps on the stairs, fast and sharp, and then the street door, and then nothing.

I sat on the kitchen floor alone and pressed both palms flat against the cold tile and breathed.

---

He showed up on Saturday.

I hadn't answered his last two texts. I'd let a call go to voicemail. I'd told myself I needed a few more days to figure out how to be a person again before I had to be his person — the version of me that smiled and deflected and made everything look fine.

The knock came at seven-thirty. I knew it was him before I opened the door. I don't know how. Maybe the particular rhythm of it. Maybe just seven years of learning the specific weight of his presence.

He was standing in the hallway in a dark jacket with a paper bag from the West Village place. The Italian one. My favorite.

'I was in the neighborhood,' he said.

We both knew he was not in the neighborhood. Brooklyn was not on the way to anything Alexander Knight needed to be.

I stepped back and let him in.

He looked around the apartment the way he had when he'd helped me move — that same careful inventory, checking the locks, the windows, the general structural integrity of my life. He set the food on the counter and started unpacking containers without asking.

'You haven't been answering,' he said.

'I've been busy.'

'With what.'

'Settling in.'

He looked at me. I looked at the containers.

We ate at the kitchen table, which was the only furniture fully assembled. I had managed about four bites of pasta when I felt it — the familiar lurch, the cold sweat at the back of my neck, the way my mouth went wrong.

I pushed back from the table.

'Bathroom,' I said, and I was already moving.

I didn't make it all the way. I made it to the hallway and then I was on my knees and my body was doing what it had been doing for five days and there was nothing dignified about any of it.

I heard his chair scrape back before I'd even reached the door.

He was behind me in seconds. His hand found my hair, pulling it back, and his other hand pressed flat between my shoulder blades — steady, warm, certain. He didn't say anything. He just held me through it.

When it was over I sat back on my heels and pressed the back of my wrist against my mouth. My eyes were watering. My whole body felt wrung out.

Alexander crouched beside me. His hand moved from my back to my shoulder. He turned me toward him, and his face was doing the thing — the unguarded thing, the thing I didn't have a name for — and his eyes moved over me the way they always did when he was trying to find what was wrong so he could fix it.

'How long,' he said quietly.

'It's just a stomach thing.'

'Evie. How long has this been happening.'

I looked at the wall.

His hand tightened on my shoulder. Not hard. Just enough to say: *I'm not leaving. I'm not looking away. Tell me.*

I closed my eyes.

'A few days,' I said.