“You’re shaking, Nina.”
“She told me about the pregnancy,” Chris says.
The silence that follows is catastrophic.
Wyatt doesn’t turn around. I watch his jaw set, his hands curl at his sides, and I can see the story writing itself behind his eyes: I told Chris, he didn’t take it well, and now Wyatt needs to protect me from the fallout.
“I need to leave,” I say.
“Nina—” Chris starts.
“Let me go,” I say to both of them. Or neither of them because I don’t know who I’m talking to anymore. I grab my purse from the counter and move for the door, and neither of them stops me, which is its own kind of devastating.
The night air hits me and I realize I’ve been holding my breath since the kitchen. My car is right there. I get in. I start it. I pull out of the driveway and I signal at the corner because that’s what normal people do, and I am a normal person having a normal night and I am fine.
I make it two blocks before the sob breaks loose.
I pull over. Park. Press my forehead against the steering wheel and let it come—all of it, the kiss and the confession and Chris’s face and Wyatt’s rigid shoulders and the shame that hasn’t gone anywhere, hasn’t even shifted, despite the fact that both men now know and neither one reacted the way I braced for.
I don’t know how to go back. I don’t know how to go forward. I don’t know how to be in a room with either of them until I figure out how to stop hating myself for a decision I’d make again.
23
Wyatt
The door closes behind her and neither of us moves.
The kitchen still smells like Marcella’s tres leches, and the dishes Nina brought in are stacked beside the sink where she left them. The faucet drips twice into the silence.
Chris is standing where he was when I told him to let go. Three feet from the counter, hands at his sides, face trained into the blankness I’ve learned to read as anything but calm. His breathing is too fast to sell it.
“What did you say to her?” I demand.
He looks at me like I’ve lost my mind. “What did I say to her?”
“I walked in and she was shaking. You had her pinned against the counter.”
“She told me about the pregnancy.” His voice cracks on the last word. “She told me she was pregnant. That she had an abortion. A week ago.”
The words hang in the air between us. She’d barely started telling me before the chaos of the evening stopped her. I sensed her brittleness all through dinner: the way she held her wineglass without drinking, the way her laugh came a beat too late. I knew she was unraveling and I sat there anyway, waiting for a better moment that was never going to come. I should have pulled both of them aside. Found a way for the three of us to sit down and just talk. Instead she had to do it alone, mid-spiral, and now we’re here.
“You already knew,” he says.
“She told me tonight. Before you got here. We didn’t get a chance to really talk about it though.”
“You knew and you just—what—went back to the dinner table and passed the bread?”
“What was I supposed to do, Chris? Announce it over dessert?”
He drags both hands across his face. For a second he looks less like a trained operative and more like a man whose world just tilted sideways. “She was falling apart. Right in front of me. And I couldn’t—” He stops. Swallows hard. “I was trying to get her to breathe. That’s all I was doing when you walked in.”
I believe him. The way his hands were around her wrists, thumbs to her pulse points. An anchor, not a cage. Instinct, not tactic.
But that doesn’t undo the image: Nina pressed against the counter, shaking, tears on her face, and his hands on her.
“She needs space,” I say. “Time to breathe.”
“She needs someone to show up for her.”
