“No,” she repeats. “I am going home.”
I step closer, lower my voice, keep it calm because if I let the rest of it in, this turns into a fight instead of a decision. “Your attacker knew where you lived. That means whoever sent him knew where to find you. You are not going back there.”
She folds her arms carefully, protective of her belly even in the gesture. “You don’t get to decide that.”
“I do where safety is concerned.”
“That’s not how this works.”
“It is now.”
Her mouth tightens. I can see the anger, the exhaustion, the humiliation of needing help from me at all. She hates feeling cornered. I know that.
So I say the quiet part out loud.
“The baby might not be mine,” I tell her. “But there are people who want to hurt you. That is enough.”
She goes still for a second, eyes searching my face like she’s looking for sarcasm or cruelty or some angle she can fight.
There isn’t one. Only the truth.
I hold her gaze. “Come to my house. Just until this is contained.”
She laughs once, tired and bitter. “Contained. You say that like I’m a leak in a pipe.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Yes.” She looks away first, toward the window, toward the hallway, toward every exit except the one I’m giving her. “That’s the problem.”
I let the silence sit.
Eventually she asks, “For how long?”
“As long as necessary.”
“That’s not reassuring.”
“No,” I say. “It isn’t.”
She closes her eyes for one second, then opens them again. “Fine,” she says. “Temporarily.”
Good enough.
A few minutes later, we’re in the car, and the drive uptown is quiet.
She sits beside me in the backseat, one hand resting over her stomach, the other at her temple now and then when the bruising starts to ache. I don’t touch her. I want to. I don’t.
The city passes in gray blocks and wet glass, the kind of morning where Manhattan looks expensive and tired at the same time. Traffic peels away as we move farther north, into streets lined with older buildings and harder money.
My childhood house sits in a place that is too large, too private, too controlled.
It takes up the whole corner lot, set back from the street behind black iron gates and a wall of trimmed hedges that keep curious people from seeing more than the upper windows. The stone façade is old, not showy in a new-money way. Heavy limestone, dark-framed windows, a carved doorway that looks more like the entrance to a private club than a home. Security cameras sit in the corners so discreetly most people never notice them.
She does.
The gates open before the car fully stops.
Inside, the front drive curves around a small courtyard fountain and ends under a covered stone portico. The house itself is quiet in that way large homes get when they are expensively maintained and not especially happy.
