Chapter 6
Alessa was discharged the following morning.
She sat in the back of the hospital cab with her hands folded neatly in her lap and her eyes on the city moving past the window. Everything looked the same. The streets, the buildings, the people walking with purpose and places to be. Everything looked completely the same and yet she felt like a stranger to all of it.
She had nowhere to go.
The reality of that settled over her like cold water as the cab moved through traffic. She had no family she could run to. Her stepparents would not receive her, their hospitality had always been conditional on her usefulness to them and she understood that better now than ever. Her friends had slowly faded during the years of her marriage, she had chosen Bryan every single time and now there was no Bryan to show for any of it.
She told the driver to take her to a hotel.
She picked one she could afford and checked in with the small amount of money she had brought with her when she left Bryan's house two nights ago. She hadn't taken anything else. No jewelry, no designer bags, nothing he had given her. She didn't want any of it.
The room was modest and quiet. She sat on the edge of the bed and looked at the space around her. Beige walls. A small window with a view of a car park. A bedside table with a lamp that flickered slightly when she turned it on.
She had gone from a penthouse to this in forty eight hours.
She should have been devastated. She expected to sit down and cry. Instead she just sat there feeling something she couldn't quite name, a strange and fragile kind of quiet inside her chest.
She placed her hand over her stomach.
"We are going to figure this out." She said quietly. It sounded more confident than she felt but she needed to hear it said out loud.
Her phone buzzed.
Bryan.
She stared at his name on the screen for a long moment, watching it flash. She declined it and set the phone face down on the bed.
It buzzed again almost immediately.
She declined it again.
A text followed seconds later.
We need to talk about the pregnancy.
She read it twice. She turned the phone over and typed back slowly.
There is nothing to talk about.
His reply came fast.
Alessa don't do this. You can't just disappear.
She stared at the message. She thought about everything she wanted to say back to him. She thought about the wall. She thought about his face when she signed those papers, the way relief had smoothed over his expression like she had just handed him a gift.
She turned the phone face down again.
She lay back on the bed and pressed both hands gently over her stomach and stared at the ceiling. Her body was still weak from the collapse and the emotions of the past two days were sitting in her bones like stones.
She needed to sleep.
She needed to think.
She needed to stop loving a man who had looked her in the face and told her he didn't love her back.
She closed her eyes.
Three floors above her, in the hotel's private restaurant, a completely different conversation was taking place.
Lydia sat across from a man she had arranged to meet quietly and without any announcement. There was wine on the table between them, barely touched. She wasn't in the mood to drink. She was in the mood to think.
"She is really pregnant." The man said. He was calm about it, clinical in the way he always was.
"Four weeks apparently." Lydia replied, her finger tracing the rim of her glass slowly.
"And Bryan's reaction?"
"Exactly what you would expect." She said, her jaw tightening slightly. "He shut down. He went quiet. He couldn't stop looking at her in that hospital bed like she was something he had broken."
The man leaned back in his chair and studied her.
"So what happens now?" He asked.
Lydia set down her glass with a quiet precision that betrayed nothing of what was moving underneath the surface.
"Nothing changes." She said simply.
"That is a bold claim given the circumstances."
"It is the only acceptable outcome." She replied. She picked up the glass again and finally took a slow sip. "Bryan is mine. He chose me. He signed those papers with his own hand and threw her out of his own house."
"A man can throw a woman out and still feel guilty about it." The man said.
"He can feel whatever he likes." Lydia replied coolly. "Feelings don't change facts."
The man was quiet for a moment.
"And the baby she is carrying?"
Lydia set her glass down for the second time and looked across the table with eyes that gave nothing away.
"I will handle it." She said.